Performance Engineering for Graduate Students: a View from Amsterdam

HPC relies on experts to design, implement, and tune (computational science) applications that can efficiently use current (super)computing systems. As such, we strongly believe we must educate our students to ensure their ability to drive these activities, together with the domain experts. To this end, in 2017, we have designed a performance engineering course that, inspired by several conference-like tutorials, covers the principles and practice of performance engineering: benchmarking, performance modeling, and performance improvement. In this paper, we describe the goals, learning objectives, and structure of the course, share students feedback and evaluation data, and discuss the lessons learned. After teaching the course seven times, our results show that the course is tough (as expected) but very well received, with high-scores and several students continuing on the path of performance engineering during and after their master studies.