This paper describes initial experiences with semi-automated performance tuning of a linear solver in LS-DYNA, a large, widely-used engineering application. Through a collection of tools supporting empirical optimization, we alleviate the burden of performance tuning for mapping today?s complex software to increasingly complex hardware platforms. We describe a tool that automatically isolates code segments for the purposes of performance tuning, code generation issues, and we present a collection of automatically-generated performance results for specific performance-oriented parameters.