Teaching performance engineering in high-performance computing (HPC) requires example codes that demonstrate bottlenecks and enable hands-on optimization. However, existing HPC applications and proxy apps often lack the balance of simplicity, transparency, and optimization potential needed for effective teaching. To address this, we developed cfdSCOPE, a compact, open-source computational fluid dynamics (CFD) proxy app specifically designed for educational purposes. cfdSCOPE simulates flow in a 3D volume using sparse linear algebra, a common HPC workload, and comprises fewer than 1,100 lines of code. Its minimal dependencies and transparent design ensure students can fully control and optimize performance-critical aspects, while its naive OpenMP parallelization provides significant optimization opportunities, thus making it an ideal tool for teaching performance engineering.
@article{arxiv.2504.03697,
title = {cfdSCOPE: A Fluid-Dynamics Proxy App for Teaching Performance Engineering},
author = {Peter Arzt and Sebastian Kreutzer and Tim Jammer and Christian Bischof},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.03697},
year = {2025}
}