Postgraduate Course: Performance Programming (PGPH11082)

Course Outline
School	School of Physics and Astronomy	College	College of Science and Engineering
Credit level (Normal year taken)	SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate)	Availability	Not available to visiting students
SCQF Credits	10	ECTS Credits	5
Summary	Application performance is one of the key requirements for HPC applications. However this is one of the more difficult requirements to satisfy: - Issues effecting performance often vary between different hardware and software environments. This requires performance issues to be frequently re-visited as the hardware and software environment changes. - Performance programming requires detailed knowledge of the underlying environment - The design decisions necessary to achieve good performance are often in conflict with other desirable properties of the program. After taking this course students should have a good practical undertanding of the general issues and methodologies associated with designing building and refactoring codes to meet performance requirements. In addition they will have an overview of a number of subjects that are important in the understanding of performance on current systems. The course will cover the following topics: - Overview of performance programming. Methodology, the optimisation cycle. - Designing for performance. Encapsulation as an aid to performance tuning. - Tools for performance programming. Profilers and code instrumentation. - Compilers and compiler optimisation. - Memory heirarchies, Memory structures and associated optimisations. - Performance tuning for shared memory. - Floating point performance. Pipelines,SIMD, vectorisation.
Course description	Not entered

Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
Pre-requisites	It is RECOMMENDED that students have passed HPC Architectures (PGPH11080)	Co-requisites
Prohibited Combinations		Other requirements	None

Course Delivery Information

Academic year 2017/18, Not available to visiting students (SS1)		Quota: None
Course Start	Semester 2
Timetable	Timetable
Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info)	Total Hours: 100 ( Lecture Hours 13, Seminar/Tutorial Hours 5, Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 2, Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours 80 )
Additional Information (Learning and Teaching)	Please contact the School for further information
Assessment (Further Info)	Written Exam 0 %, Coursework 100 %, Practical Exam 0 %
Additional Information (Assessment)	100% Coursework
Feedback	Not entered
No Exam Information

Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course students should be able to: - Understand the appropriate methodology when attempting to improve code performance. - Understand how performance is achieved via hardware, compilers and operating systems. - Appreciate the limitations of systems and recognise when these will have a serious impact. - Interpret the observed performance of code in terms of how its execution is realised on the system. - Identify code regions appropriate for manual optimisation and propose, implement and evaluate optimisations on these regions.