Performance Engineering with a Coding Agent: A Real HPC Case Study
Thursday, 30 July 2026 -
11:00
Monday, 27 July 2026
Tuesday, 28 July 2026
Wednesday, 29 July 2026
Thursday, 30 July 2026
11:00
Infrastructure, safety, and diagnosis
-
Leszek Grzanka
Klemens Noga
(
ACC Cyfronet AGH
)
Infrastructure, safety, and diagnosis
Leszek Grzanka
Klemens Noga
(
ACC Cyfronet AGH
)
11:00 - 13:30
- Introduction to the domain problem, and a walkthrough of the naive implementation of the PDE solver. - Cyfronet-hosted LLMs: why running GLM 5.2 on-premises matters — free at this scale, data never leaves the cluster, coding ability similar to Claude Sonnet's - Using an agent safely: permission modes, reviewing diffs before accepting them, git commits as checkpoints, never approving destructive commands or job submissions blindly — the rules for the rest of the day Setup: Athena account, opencode + GLM 5.2 token, a quick "hello agent" test — and the day's submission rule: the agent drafts job scripts, participants review and submit them by hand - Orientation: the problem we're solving, how the starting code works, and the materials everyone begins with — the code itself, a way to measure performance, and a way to check the results are still correct - Hands-on: treat the agent as a lab assistant, not an author — "run the sweep, plot wall time and speedup vs. thread count, explain the shape" — and write a short diagnosis based on the output
13:30
Lunch
Lunch
13:30 - 14:20
14:20
Optimization: algorithmic and hardware-aware
-
Klemens Noga
(
ACC Cyfronet AGH
)
Leszek Grzanka
Optimization: algorithmic and hardware-aware
Klemens Noga
(
ACC Cyfronet AGH
)
Leszek Grzanka
14:20 - 16:00
- Reframing the question: instead of "make it faster," have the agent check the hardware it's running on — cores, cache, NUMA layout. - Hands-on: algorithmic optimization — restructuring the hot loop - Hands-on: hardware-aware optimization — deciding how, and whether, to parallelize - Re-run the timing harness and the correctness check after every change
16:00
Coffee break
Coffee break
16:00 - 16:30
16:30
Solution reveal, security debrief, and wrap-up
-
Leszek Grzanka
Klemens Noga
(
ACC Cyfronet AGH
)
Solution reveal, security debrief, and wrap-up
Leszek Grzanka
Klemens Noga
(
ACC Cyfronet AGH
)
16:30 - 18:00
- Synthesis: compare each participant's findings against the optimized reference - Discussion: where the agent's hardware reasoning held up under measurement, where it didn't, and how participants told the difference - Security retrospective: LLMs executing risky commands, why the rules held, and what to take away for using coding agents on shared HPC accounts - Wrap-up: agent as an analysis-and-optimization tool, not autocomplete; the case for on-prem LLMs; pointers to the reference repo