David SIbai, BNP-PAR

Title: Introduction to performance engineering

Abstract: Performance tuning is often seen as a black box, but it shouldn’t – it’s a standard engineering problem, like any other.  The purpose of this talk is to introduce standard models and techniques to measure, estimate and fix performance issues. After going back to the basics of what a computer is, along with the software stack sitting atop from a programmers perspective, we’ll go through sequential and parallel models of the performance of a system ( orders of magnitude of various operations, Amdahl’s law, etc ). There will also be several examples of performance troubleshooting, and we’ll study the performance of alternative systems ( GPUs, etc ).