Computer Science Colloquium – “The Dark Art of Software Performance”

“The Dark Art of Software Performance”

Software performance is more important than ever before. Users expect software to be quick and responsive, whether it is running in a remote data center or on a power-constrained mobile device. Scientists increasingly rely on computation to do research, where improving performance brings previously intractable problems within reach, and companies rely on performance improvements to handle increased traffic and limit energy consumption. Meeting these demands used to be possible by running old programs on newer, faster hardware, but those days are over. Instead of increasing clock speeds, each new processor generation adds additional cores. Individually these cores are no faster than single core processors from a decade ago. To use this new parallel hardware effectively, we need to write parallel programs. Unfortunately, these programs can have surprising and unintuitive performance problems that existing performance tools fail to address. In this talk I will introduce parallel programming, explain why it is difficult to make these programs both fast and correct, and show how my research makes it easier to improve the performance of parallel code.

Charlie Curtsinger is an assistant professor of computer science at Grinnell College, a liberal arts college in central Iowa. He graduated with Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Professor Curtsinger’s research is in both operating systems and programming languages, with a particular focus on building tools to make life easier for software developers. His past projects include Coz, a new kind of software profiler that is now part of most major Linux distributions; Stabilizer, a compiler that makes it possible to run statistically-sound performance evaluations; and DoubleTake, a debugging tool that precisely identifies the cause of program crashes. His honors include a Google PhD Fellowship, best-paper award for Coz at SOSP’15, and Honorable Mention for the Dennis M. Ritchie dissertation award.