A novel performance analysis workshop series concept, developed at Durham University under the umbrella of the ExCALIBUR programme

From January 2021 until July 2021, a group of members of the POP consortium, DiRAC, the
N8 CIR, Durham University’s Institute for Computational Cosmology and members of Computer
Science organised a series of seven workshops around performance analysis and optimisation. The
series covered a variety of tools, featured different invited speakers, and addressed inter-node, intra-
node and core-level runtime efficiency. In contrast to established workshops that usually run en
bloc over multiple days with individual participants, we organised a series of one-day workshops
and invited teams of participants. Each team consisted of multiple (3–7) scientific software
developers working together on one code base. This report summarises the workshops as well as
feedback gathered at the end and throughout the series. It discusses interesting lessons learned
w.r.t. the status quo of the codes/teams that signed up for the series, it summarises impressions
regarding the training status and needs of the participants, and it relates these take-aways to
current discussions around the training of high-performance computing application developers in
the UK.