Stepan Vanecek

Research interests

• Modern HPC architectures and topologies
  • Topological details in HPC and their effect on performance
  • Performance modelling on heterogeneous memory systems
  • Benchmarking fine-grained system characteristics
• Performance analysis of parallel applications
  • Memory and performance optimizations on CPUs and GPUs

Publications

• Stepan Vanecek, Manuel Walter Mußbacher, Dominik Größler, Urvij Saroliya and Martin Schulz, MT4G: A Tool for Reliable Auto-Discovery of NVIDIA and AMD GPU Compute and Memory Topologies (SC ProTools 2025, to appear)
• Stepan Vanecek, Managing Heterogeneous Topologies and Understanding Their Impact on Performance (SC'25 Doctoral Showcase Poster, to appear)
• Durganshu Mishra, Stepan Vanecek, Jorge Echavarria, Xiaolong Deng, Burak Mete, Laura Schulz and Martin Schulz, Towards a Unified Architectural Representation in HPCQC: Extending sys-sage for Quantum Technologies (ISC'25, Hans Meuer Award winner) paper
• Stepan Vanecek and Martin Schulz, sys-sage: A Unified Representation of Dynamic Topologies & Attributes on HPC Systems, (ICS'24) paper slides
• Soumya Sen, Stepan Vanecek, and Martin Schulz, GPUscout: Locating Data Movement-related Bottlenecks on GPUs, (ProTools 2023) paper  slides
• Stepan Vanecek and Martin Schulz, sys-sage: A Fresh View on Dynamic Topologies & Attributes of HPC Systems, (SC'23 Research Poster) poster extended abstract

Tools

• sys-sage: Library for capturing and manipulating hadrware topology of compute systems ( https://github.com/caps-tum/sys-sage )
• Mitos: Memory access sample collection tool ( https://github.com/caps-tum/mitos )
• MemAxes: Memory access visualisation tool ( https://github.com/caps-tum/MemAxes )
• GPUscout: Tool for memory-related bottleneck analysis on GPUs ( https://github.com/caps-tum/GPUscout )
• MT4G: Tool for reverse-engineering GPU memory topologies ( https://github.com/caps-tum/mt4g )

Projects

• DEEP-SEA ( www.deep-projects.eu )
• Plasma-PEPSC ( https://plasma-pepsc.eu )
• SEANERGYS ( https://www.ce.cit.tum.de/caps/laufende-projekte/seanergys-eurohpc/ )

 

Teaching & Theses

 

Available Student Theses:

This list may be out-of-date (updated 09/2025). Please refer to Open Theses page of CAPS or email me personally.

• MA: Exploring the Effect of System Configuration on Performance Variability in HPC systems (co-advised with LRZ)
• BA/GR: Extending Mitos PEBS sample collection to Icelake architecture
• BA/MA/GR: Reverse-engineering GPU architectures and capabilities (AMD CDNA3)
• MA/GR: Reverse-engineering GPU compute capabilities with MT4G
• MA/GR: Extending MPI-over-CXL model with collectives

Please reach out to me to ask about the currently offered topics; there are usually more topics in the pipeline than what is published. I am looking for motivated students interested in writing a Thesis/Guided Research with me. Many of the topics can be wrapped up by co-writing a conference/workshop paper.

Student Theses (completed):

• [BA, 2025] Jonathan Wieser: Design, Implementation, and Test of a Python API for sys-sage
• [MA, 2025] Tobias Stuckenberger: Visual Presentation of GPUscout GPU Bottleneck Analysis
• [MA, 2025] Benedikt Deike: Extending GPUscout analysis to AMD GPUs
• [MA, 2024] Durganshu Mishra: Representing Quantum System Information and Topologies in sys-sage
• [BA, 2024] Finn Romaneessen: Transferring Hardware-related Information in sys-sage Across Processes and HPC Nodes
• [MA, 2024] Philip Sändig: Exploring Performance Variability in CPUs with sys-sage
• [BA, 2024] Jazmin Dojcsak: Integration of PAPI Metrics Collection Functionality Into the sys-sage Library
• [BA, 2023] Mohammad Khadem (co-advised with Eishi Arima)
• [BA, 2023] James Sutanto: Ranking Nodes by Energy Efficiency Using sys-sage (co-advised with Eishi Arima)
• [BA, 2023] Matthias Süß: Exploration of Performance Variations of GPU Cores
• [BA, 2023] Felix Sandmair: Collection of HPC Network Topology Information in sys-sage
• [BA, 2023] Daniel Schenk: Extension of MemAxes sample visualization to process AMD IBS samples
• [BA, 2023] Maksym Azatian: Capturing Memory Topology Across Different GPU Architectures
• [MA, 2023] Maximilian Geitner: An Analysis and Implementation of AMD IBS Sample Collection for Performance Analysis Purposes
• [MA, 2023] Soumya Sen: Discovering data movement-related bottlenecks on NVidia GPUs
• [BA, 2023] Jim Eckerlein: An Environment for Continuous Integration and Software Testing for sys-sage
• [MA, 2023] Ke Wang: Reverse Engineering Hardware Prefetching Mechanisms for Use in sys-sage (co-advised with Eishi Arima)
• [BA, 2022] Mark Pirkowski: A visual presentation of an HPC system state as stored in sys-sage
• [BA, 2022] Dominik Grössler: Capturing the memory topology of GPUs
• [BA, 2022] Ruilin Qi: Analysis of data movements over the PCIe bus in heterogeneous systems

Lectures/Seminars:

• [SS25] Seminar: Performance Modeling for Parallel Applications and Emerging Architectures
• [SS23] Seminar: History of Computer Architecture (Geschichte der Rechnerarchitektur)
• [SS22] Seminar: History of Computer Architecture (Geschichte der Rechnerarchitektur)