Exploiting thread-level parallelism has become a part of mainstream programming in recent years. Many approaches to parallelization require threads executing in parallel to also synchronize occassionally (i.e., coordinate concurrent accesses to shared state). Transactional Memory (TM) is a programming abstraction that provides the concept of database transactions in the context of programming languages such as C/C++. This allows programmers to only declare which pieces of a program synchronize without requiring them to actually implement synchronization and tune its performance, which in turn makes TM typically easier to use than other abstractions such as locks. I have investigated and implemented the building blocks that are required for a high-performance, practical, and realistic TM. They host several novel algorithms and optimizations for TM implementations, both for current hardware and future hardware extensions for TM, and are being used in or have influenced commercial TM implementations such as the TM support in GCC.

High Performance Computing (HPC) has become an indispensable tool for the scientific community to perform simulations on models whose complexity would exceed the limits of a standard computer. An unfortunate trend concerning HPC systems is that their power consumption under high-demanding workloads increases. To counter this trend, hardware vendors have implemented power saving mechanisms in recent years, which has increased the variability in power demands of single nodes. These capabilities provide an opportunity to increase the energy efficiency of HPC applications. To utilize these hardware power saving mechanisms efficiently, their overhead must be analyzed. Furthermore, applications have to be examined for performance and energy efficiency issues, which can give hints for optimizations. This requires an infrastructure that is able to capture both, performance and power consumption information concurrently. The mechanisms that such an infrastructure would inherently support could further be used to implement a tool that is able to do both, measuring and tuning of energy efficiency. This thesis targets all steps in this process by making the following contributions: First, I provide a broad overview on different related fields. I list common performance measurement tools, power measurement infrastructures, hardware power saving capabilities, and tuning tools. Second, I lay out a model that can be used to define and describe energy efficiency tuning on program region scale. This model includes hardware and software dependent parameters. Hardware parameters include the runtime overhead and delay for switching power saving mechanisms as well as a contemplation of their scopes and the possible influence on application performance. Thus, in a third step, I present methods to evaluate common power saving mechanisms and list findings for different x86 processors. Software parameters include their performance and power consumption characteristics as well as the influence of power-saving mechanisms on these. To capture software parameters, an infrastructure for measuring performance and power consumption is necessary. With minor additions, the same infrastructure can later be used to tune software and hardware parameters. Thus, I lay out the structure for such an infrastructure and describe common components that are required for measuring and tuning. Based on that, I implement adequate interfaces that extend the functionality of contemporary performance measurement tools. Furthermore, I use these interfaces to conflate performance and power measurements and further process the gathered information for tuning. I conclude this work by demonstrating that the infrastructure can be used to manipulate power-saving mechanisms of contemporary x86 processors and increase the energy efficiency of HPC applications.

Die komplexen Interaktionen von Aerosolen, Wolken und Niederschlag werden in aktuellen Vorhersagemodellen nur ungenügend dargestellt. Simulationen mit spektraler Beschreibung von Wolkenprozessen können zu verbesserten Vorhersagen beitragen, sind jedoch weitaus rechenintensiver. Die Beschleunigung dieser Simulationen erfordert eine hochparallele Ausführung. In dieser Arbeit wird ein Konzept zur Kopplung spektraler Wolkenmikrophysikmodelle mit atmosphärischen Modellen entwickelt, das eine effiziente Nutzung der heute verfügbaren Parallelität der Größenordnung von 100.000 Prozessorkernen ermöglicht. Aufgrund des stark variierenden Rechenaufwands ist dafür eine hochskalierbare dynamische Lastbalancierung des Wolkenmikrophysikmodells unumgänglich. Dies wird durch ein hierarchisches Partitionierungsverfahren erreicht, das auf raumfüllenden Kurven basiert. Darüber hinaus wird eine hochskalierbare Verknüpfung von dynamischer Lastbalancierung und Modellkopplung durch ein effizientes Verfahren für die regelmäßige Bestimmung der Überschneidungen zwischen unterschiedlichen Partitionierungen ermöglicht. Durch die effiziente Nutzung von Hochleistungsrechnern ermöglichen die Ergebnisse der Arbeit die Anwendung spektraler Wolkenmikrophysikmodelle zur Simulation realistischer Szenarien auf hochaufgelösten Gittern. / Current forecast models insufficiently represent the complex interactions of aerosols, clouds and precipitation. Simulations with spectral description of cloud processes allow more detailed forecasts. However, they are much more computationally expensive. Reducing the runtime of such simulations requires a highly parallel execution. This thesis presents a concept for coupling spectral cloud microphysics models with atmospheric models that allows for efficient utilization of today\'s available parallelism in the order of 100.000 processor cores. Due to the strong workload variations, highly scalable dynamic load balancing of the cloud microphysics model is essential in order to reach this goal. This is achieved through a hierarchical partitioning method based on space-filling curves. Furthermore, a highly scalable connection of dynamic load balancing and model coupling is facilitated by an efficient method to regularly determine the intersections between different partitionings. The results of this thesis enable the application of spectral cloud microphysics models for the simulation of realistic scenarios with high resolution grids by efficient use of high performance computers.

Performance measurement and runtime tuning tools are both vital in the HPC software ecosystem and use similar techniques: the analyzed application is interrupted at specific events and information on the current system state is gathered to be either recorded or used for tuning. One of the established performance measurement tools is Score-P. It supports numerous HPC platforms and parallel programming paradigms. To extend Score-P with support for different back-ends, create a common framework for measurement and tuning of HPC applications, and to enable the re-use of common software components such as implemented instrumentation techniques, this paper makes the following contributions: (I) We describe the Score-P metric plugin interface, which enables programmers to augment the event stream with metric data from supplementary data sources that are otherwise not accessible for Score-P. (II) We introduce the flexible Score-P substrate plugin interface that can be used for custom processing of the event stream according to the specific requirements of either measurement, analysis, or runtime tuning tasks. (III) We provide examples for both interfaces that extend Score-P’s functionality for monitoring and tuning purposes.