The goal of this exercise is to do memory profiling with one or more large applications, where by “large” we mean something for which you will not be able to read all of the relevant code as you may have done with earlier toy examples. To find problems you will need to rely heavily on the profiling tool to indicate the interesting code sections to examine.
Ideally you should choose some application that you would use in your normal work environment. In that case you will also need to build IgProf for yourself. Otherwise you can choose some open source (scientific) application that you can build yourself and which provides some non-trivial test or example job which you can run.
Steps
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Choose an application to run.
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If you are working in the ESC school environment (and will thus use the installation of IgProf available to you on the ESC machines), you should build the software you have chosen to profile on the ESC machines. If you will be working in some other environment (e.g. your normal working environment), you will need to build IgProf for yourself in that environment.
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Run the program, once for performance and once for memory profiles.
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Try to identify suitable spots for optimisation, any major memory leaks and main sources of memory churn.
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Write down the short list (< 10) list of your main observations, and which problems or aspects you would address first, and why.