Effective Software
Semestr: Summer
Range: 2P+2C
Completion:
Credits: 6
Programme type:
Study form: Fulltime
Course language: English
Summary:
Students will become familiar with the issues of software and algorithm optimization under limited resources. The course focuses on the efficient use of modern hardware architectures, namely multi-core and multiprocessor shared-memory systems. Students will learn to implement the techniques presented in the lectures in C and Java. The main topics include code optimization, efficient data structures and the use of CPU cache memory, data structures in multithreaded applications, and the implementation of high-performance network servers.
Keywords:
Course syllabus:
1. Introduction, modern computer architecture, C compilers.
2. Bentley's rules, C compiler, profiling.
3. Benchmarking, measurements, metrics, statistics, WCET, timestamping.
4. Scalable synchronization – from mutexes to RCU (read-copy-update), transactional memory, scalable API.
5. Memory access – efficient programming with caches, dynamic memory allocation (malloc, NUMA, ...)
6. Serialization of data structures – JSON, XML, protobufs, AVRO, cap'n'proto, mmap/shared memory.
7. Program run – virtual machine, byte-code, Java compiler, JIT compiler, relation to machine code, byte-code analysis, dissasembly of Java byte-code, optimization in compilers, program performance analysis, profiling.
8. Data concurrency in JVM – multi-threaded access to data, locks monitoring, atomic operations, lock-less/block-free data structures, non-blocking algorithms (queue, stack, set, dictionary), data races, synchronization.
9. Efficient servers, C10K, non-blocking I/O, efficient networking, threads.
10. JVM – Memory analysis (dynamic/static), data structures, collections for performance.
11. JVM – Object allocation, bloom filters, references, effective caching.
12. Virtualization (IOMMU, SR-IOV, PCI pass-through, virtio, …).
13. Memory Management in JVM – Memory Layout, Garbage Collectors.
Seminar syllabus:
Literature:
[1] MIT: Performance-engineering-of-software-systems
[2] Oaks, S.: Java Performance: 2nd Edition. O'Reilly, USA 2020.
[3] Jones, R., Hosking, A., Moss, E.: The Garbage Collection Handbook - The Art of Automatic Memory Management. CRC Press, USA 2012.
[4] Herlihy, M., Shavit, N.: The Art of Multiprocessor Programming. Morgan Kaufman, 2008.
[5] Fog, A.: The microarchitecture of Intel, AMD and VIA CPU, 2016.
[6] Drepper U.: What every programmer should know about memory, 2007
[7] Jain, R.: The Art of Computer Systems Performance Evaluation. Wiley, New York 1991. (slides, book)
[8] Lilja, D. J.: Measuring Computer Performance: A Practitioner?s Guide. Cambridge University Press, 2000. (book web site, Supplemental Teaching Materials)