This course teaches performance engineering approaches on the compute node level. "Performance engineering" as we define it is more than employing tools to identify hotspots and bottlenecks. It is about developing a thorough understanding of the interactions between software and hardware. This process must start at the core, socket, and node level, where the code gets executed that does the actual computational work. Once the architectural requirements of a code are understood and correlated with performance measurements, the potential benefit of optimizations can often be predicted. We introduce a "holistic" node-level performance engineering strategy, apply it to different algorithms from computational science, and also show how an awareness of the performance features of an application may lead to notable reductions in power consumption.
