Performance models help us to understand how HPC applications scale, which is crucial for efficiently utilizing HPC resources. They describe the performance (e.g., runtime) as a function of one or more execution parameters (e.g., problem size and the degree of parallelism). Creating one manually for a given program is challenging and time-consuming. Automatically learning a model from performance data is a viable alternative, but potentially resource-intensive. Extra-P is a tool that implements this approach. The user begins by selecting values for each parameter. Each combination of values defines a possible measurement point. The choice of measurement points affects the quality and cost of the resulting models, creating a complex optimization problem. A naive approach takes measurements for all possible measurement points, the number of which grows exponentially with the number of parameters. In our earlier work, we demonstrated that a quasi-linear number of points is sufficient and that prioritizing the least expensive points is a generic strategy with a good trade-off between cost and quality. Here, we present an improved selection strategy based on Gaussian process regression (GPR) that selects points individually for each modeling task. In our synthetic evaluation, which was based on tens of thousands of artificially generated functions, the naive approach achieved 66% accuracy with two model parameters and 5% artificial noise. At only 10% of the naïve approach's cost, the generic approach already achieved 47.3% accuracy, while the GPR-based approach achieved even 77.8% accuracy. Similar improvements were observed in experiments involving different numbers of model parameters and noise levels, as well as in case studies with realistic applications.

Commissioning is a critical phase in the lifecycle of an industrial drive system, significantly affecting overall performance and reliability. It involves configuring drives and motors for specific applications—such as mixing, pumping, or operating conveyors—and often requires managing complex interdependencies. Traditionally, commissioning is performed manually by domain experts through multiple steps, requiring them to navigate various resources ranging from drive datasheets to vendor-specific tools for drive parameter adjustment. This manual process is time-consuming, and errors can cause significant delays, sometimes lasting several days. In this paper, we propose DriveAIAgent, a novel system architecture and methodology that integrates generative AI-powered multi-agent systems to automate and enhance the commissioning and troubleshooting of industrial drives. Our agentic system utilizes expert tools to interact with and respond to external environments, incorporating a human-in-the-loop approach. The evaluation shows that our system achieves 100% accuracy in identifying encoder parameters during the initial commissioning phase, as well as very high solution relevance (94.73%) and correctness (86.29%) for troubleshooting across different drive types. Overall, DriveAIAgent can streamline complex interactions and significantly reduce the time required for commissioning and troubleshooting industrial drive systems while maintaining the same level of quality as a human expert.

Empirical performance modeling is a proven instrument to analyze the scaling behavior of HPC applications. Using a set of smaller-scale experiments, it can provide important insights into application behavior at larger scales. Extra-P is an empirical modeling tool that applies linear regression to automatically generate human-readable performance models. Similar to other regression-based modeling techniques, the accuracy of the models created by Extra-P decreases as the amount of noise in the underlying data increases. This is why the performance variability observed in many contemporary systems can become a serious challenge. In this paper, we introduce a novel adaptive modeling approach that makes Extra-P more noise resilient, exploiting the ability of deep neural networks to discover the effects of numerical parameters, such as the number of processes or the problem size, on performance when dealing with noisy measurements. Using synthetic analysis and data from three different case studies, we demonstrate that our solution improves the model accuracy at high noise levels by up to 25% while increasing their predictive power by about 15%.

Identifying scalability bottlenecks in parallel applications is a vital but also laborious and expensive task. Empirical performance models have proven to be helpful to find such limitations, though they require a set of experiments in order to gain valuable insights. Therefore, the experiment design determines the quality and cost of the models. Extra-P is an empirical modeling tool that uses small-scale experiments to assess the scalability of applications. Its current version requires an exponential number of experiments per model parameter. This makes the creation of empirical performance models very expensive, and in some situations even impractical. In this paper, we propose a novel parameter-value selection heuristic, which functions as a guideline for the experiment design, leveraging sparse performance-modeling, a technique that only needs a polynomial number of experiments per model parameter. Using synthetic analysis and data from three different case studies, we show that our solution reduces the average modeling costs by about 85% while retaining 92% of the model accuracy.