The SPEC MPI2007 1.0 benchmark suite provides a rich variety of message-passing HPC application kernels to compare the performance of parallel/distributed computer systems. Its 13 applications use a representative cross-section of programming languages (C/C++/ Fortran, often combined) and MPI programming patterns (e.g., blocking vs. non-blocking vs. persistent point-to-point communication, with or without extensive collective communication). This offers a basis with which to examine the effectiveness of parallel performance tools using real-world applications that have already been extensively optimized and tuned (at least for sequential execution), but which may still have parallelization inefficiencies and scalability problems. In this context, the Scalasca toolset for scalable performance analysis of large-scale parallel applications, which has been extended to distinguish iteration/timestep phases, is evaluated with this suite on an IBM SP2 ‘Regatta’ system, and found to be effective at identifying significant performance improvement opportunities.