Postgraduate Course: Performance Programming (PGPH11082)
Course Outline
| School | School of Physics and Astronomy |
College | College of Science and Engineering |
| Course type | Standard |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Credits | 10 |
| Home subject area | Postgraduate (School of Physics and Astronomy) |
Other subject area | None |
| Course website |
None |
Taught in Gaelic? | No |
| Course description | 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. |
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 |
| Additional Costs | None |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Summary of Intended 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. |
Assessment Information
| 100% Coursework |
Special Arrangements
| None |
Additional Information
| Academic description |
Not entered |
| Syllabus |
Not entered |
| Transferable skills |
Not entered |
| Reading list |
Not entered |
| Study Abroad |
Not entered |
| Study Pattern |
Not entered |
| Keywords | PFP |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Stephen Booth
Tel:
Email: |
Course secretary | Yuhua Lei
Tel: (0131 6) 517067
Email: |
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