[Pl-seminar] Reminder: Tomorrow, 10:30am: Emery Berger, Performance Matters

[William J. Bowman]

Reminder: seminar tomorrow!

On Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 2:43 PM, William J. Bowman <wilbowma at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
> NUPRL Seminar presents
>
> Emery Berger (http://emeryberger.com/)
> U. Massachusetts, Amherst
>
> Host: Jan Vitek
> 10:30am
> Friday, Nov. 21, 2015
> Room 366 WVH (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/wand/directions.html)
>
>
> Performance Matters
>
> Abstract:
>
> Performance clearly matters to users. The most common software update on
> the AppStore *by far* is "Bug fixes and performance enhancements." Now that
> Moore's Law Free Lunch has ended, programmers have to work hard to get high
> performance for their applications. But why is performance so hard to
> deliver?
>
> I will first explain why our current approaches to evaluating and
> optimizing performance don't work, especially on modern hardware and for
> modern applications. I will then present two systems that address these
> challenges. Stabilizer is a tool that enables statistically sound
> performance evaluation, making it possible to understand the impact of
> optimizations and conclude things like the fact that the -O2 and -O3
> optimization levels are indistinguishable from noise (unfortunately true).
>
> Since compiler optimizations have largely run out of steam, we need better
> profiling support, especially for modern concurrent, multi-threaded
> applications. Coz is a novel "causal profiler" that lets programmers
> optimize for throughput or latency, and which pinpoints and accurately
> predicts the impact of optimizations. Coz's approach unlocks numerous
> previously unknown optimization opportunities. Guided by Coz, we improved
> the performance of Memcached by 9%, SQLite by 25%, and accelerated six
> Parsec applications by as much as 68%; in most cases, these optimizations
> involved modifying under 10 lines of code.
>
> This talk is based on work with Charlie Curtsinger published at ASPLOS
> 2013 (Stabilizer) and SOSP 2015 (Coz), where it received a Best Paper Award.
>
>
> Bio:
> Emery Berger is a Professor in the College of Information and Computer
> Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the flagship campus of
> the UMass system. He graduated with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the
> University of Texas at Austin in 2002. Professor Berger has been a Visiting
> Scientist at Microsoft Research (7 times) and at the Universitat
> Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC) / Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC).
>
> Professor Berger’s research spans programming languages, runtime systems,
> and operating systems, with a particular focus on systems that
> transparently improve reliability, security, and performance. He is the
> creator of a number of influential software systems including Hoard, a fast
> and scalable memory manager that accelerates multithreaded applications
> (used by companies including British Telecom, Cisco, Crédit Suisse,
> Reuters, Royal Bank of Canada, SAP, and Tata, and on which the Mac OS X
> memory manager is based); DieHard, an error-avoiding memory manager that
> directly influenced the design of the Windows 7 Fault-Tolerant Heap; and
> DieHarder, a secure memory manager that was an inspiration for hardening
> changes made to the Windows 8 heap.
>
> His honors include a Microsoft Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a
> Lilly Teaching Fellowship, a Most Influential Paper Award at OOPSLA 2012, a
> Google Research Award, a Microsoft SEIF Award, a Best Artifact Award at
> PLDI, and Best Paper Awards at FAST, OOPSLA, and SOSP; he was named an ACM
> Senior Member in 2010. Professor Berger is currently a Member of the
> SIGPLAN Executive Committee and an Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions
> on Programming Languages and Systems, and will serve as Program Chair for
> PLDI 2016.
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