Introduction

Abstract

In recent years, the emergence and evolution of large scale parallel systems, grids, cloud computing environments, and multi-core architectures have prompted the performance community to push its boundaries. Whether system scale is achieved by coupling processors with a large number of cores that are tightly coupled or by massive numbers of loosely coupled processors, many systems will contain hundreds of thousands of processors on which millions of computation threads solve ever larger and more complex problems. At the same time, the coverage of the term ’performance’ has constantly broadened to include reliability, robustness, energy consumption, and scalability in addition to classical performance-oriented evaluations of system functionalities. In response to these two new sets of challenges, our community has the mission to develop a range of novel methodologies and tools for performance modeling, evaluation, prediction, measurement, benchmarking, and visualization of existing and emerging large scale parallel and distributed systems.