The POP objective is to help improve the performance obtained by applications on current systems, help identify the really important issues in a quantitative way and help the community maximize the productivity of their development efforts when addressing very large scales.

 POP is providing a service to customers from all application domains (engineering, sciences, data analytics, climate, medical, media, deep learning…). Customers apply by filling a small request service form in the project web page (www.pop-coe.eu). The main service is an “assessment” report where an external view is given to the customer on the performance issues experience by the application and recommendations on what would be the most productive code refactoring directions. A unified set of metrics and methodology have been set up to homogenize the reports across partners. In some cases, a “proof of concept (POC)” follow up service is performed where POP experts help customers to apply the proposed techniques and demonstrate the actual performance gains.

The customer gets an assessment report between 5 and 15 pages with a description of the identified issues and recommendations on how to address them. Performance gains from just 10% up to 10x have already been observed on different POC services. Close to 100 assessments have already been performed. UK, Germany and Spain are the countries with more services received, but almost 25% of the services are to countries outside the consortium. The POP CoE is actually a hub establishing links and sharing experiences among a very large community.

One of the activities of the project is to gather feedback from customers on the quality of the service provided so that we can improve our operation. Overall, the customers are very happy and value very positively the assessments and recommendations received. Under their permission, reports are made available in the project web page. We also include there summarized success stories and customer testimonials.