Enhancing eResearch productivity with NeSI's consultancy service

Many research areas from bioinformatics and genomics, to materials science, fundamental physics, earthquake simulation and weather/climate prediction are increasingly dependent on the availability of powerful computing platforms and deep software stacks. Unfortunately, scientific software too often runs at sub-optimal performance, sometimes reaching only a few percent of the maximum peak performance of the supercomputer. Small changes in code implementation details, the choice of compilers and libraries and adjustments in runtime environment have been shown to sometimes have a significant impact on code performance. By walking through some examples, we show how researchers were able to leverage NeSI’s free consultancy service to squeeze more performance out of their application, sometimes reducing the execution time by several factors, a win-win solution which benefits science and saves core hours.