Bengaluru Systems Meetup #10

In the pursuit of maximum throughput, there is no denying that many-core (with multiple sockets) systems are the protagonists. With this comes the sour (or sweet) complexity that we engineers and researchers have to try and devise ways to make our software run in it’s best form. As a budding systems researcher, I came across some essential skills and factors to know and observe before jumping into the maze of performance engineering as these are often overlooked. I would like to share some of these skills and factors to consider when you are seeking optimal/maximal throughput and/or with efficient resource utilisation.

Here are some things I would like to talk about:

1. Understanding the software architecture
2. Understanding the targeted hardware architecture
3. Understanding memory access patterns
4. The role of the operating system in performance analysis
5. The art of profiling
6. Extra bit: When to use custom or specialized hardware to accelerate?

I would like to keep things brief and give a general overview of performance analysis and optimization. This talk should take about 30 minutes.