With the growing demand for parallel computing resources, it´s important that researchers have access to software tools to optimize both their programming and the analysis of the performance of their codes. Providing the necessary tools that are both robust and user-friendly, can dramatically reduce the amount of time spent developing the application, diagnosing problems in the applications, and leads to more efficient use of the allocated computing resources.

Therefore, the ZIH sees an important part of its mission as developing and deploying robust software tools to support programming, as well as performance analysis and optimization. The aim of these tools is to help programmers, as they develop and parallelize large-scale applications, to identify problems and support more efficient programming for particular systems.

For example, the performance tracking and visualization tool Vampir was originally developed in a research environment and has gained worldwide acceptance as an effective tool for analysis and optimization of parallel programs. New developments and improvements resulting from the ongoing research activities at ZIH in the domain of software tools are announced via the zih-vampir-research mailing list on a regular basis. This mailing list can be subscribed here.