6.172 Performance Engineering of Software Systems
Fall 2010
Instructors: Saman P Amarasinghe, Charles E Leiserson
TAs: Eirik Bakke, John Dong, Reid N Kleckner, Joshua F Slocum
Lecture:
TR2.30-4
(26-100)
Office Hours: Weekdays 4-5PM
(32-G7 lounge or 32-G725)
Information:
Modern computing platforms provide unprecedented amounts of raw
computational power. But significant complexity comes along with
this power, to the point that making useful computations exploit
even a fraction of the potential of the computing platform is a
substantial challenge. Indeed, obtaining good performance requires
a comprehensive understanding of all layers of the underlying
platform, deep insight into the computation at hand, and the
ingenuity and creativity required to obtain an effective mapping of
the computation onto the machine. The reward for mastering these
sophisticated and challenging topics is the ability to make
computations that can process large amount of data orders of
magnitude more quickly and efficiently and to obtain results that
are unavailable with standard practice.
This class is a hands-on, project-based introduction to building
scalable and high-performance software systems. Topics include:
performance analysis, algorithmic techniques for high performance,
instruction-level optimizations, cache and memory hierarchy
optimization, parallel programming, and building scalable
distributed systems.
Announcements
Are you tired of 6.172 emails?
If so, please help make these emails stop by filling out the course evaluation at https://sixweb.mit.edu/student/evaluate/6.172-f2010So far, less than 50% of students have responded :(. We hope to
have this number at 90% or better. Your feedback (whether positive
or negative) is very important to the future of 6.172!
Announced on 10 December 2010 8:39 p.m. by John Dong
PLEASE READ: A Personal Appeal from 6.172 Course Staff
Now that we are two hours from the last project deadline for the class, we'd like to remind everyone again to complete the course evaluation at https://sixweb.mit.edu/student/evaluate/6.172-f2010
So far, only 18% of students have participated. We hope to have at
least 90% participation.
Announced on 09 December 2010 9:59 a.m. by John Dong
Course evaluations
Announced on 08 December 2010 1:06 a.m. by Charles E Leiserson
Due Date Clarification
Several students pointed out that we mistakenly put a due date of "Thursday, Dec 9 2009" in the handout, and had planned their work based on the assumption that the project is due in class.
We have decided to postpone the deadline to 12:00 NOON on
thursday (no exceptions), but we strongly urge you to submit a
beta at 11:59PM on Wednesday night.
The reason is, we need to check your projects against the 48-core machine as well as precompute some performance estimates on your code for the purposes of the derby. This requires for us to have enough time to run everybody's code and/or chase down any issues.
So, we will be grabbing a beta copy of your code at midnight, then
a final copy at noon. If your final copy does not work during
testing, we will revert to your beta. If neither work, then
you're in trouble.
Sorry for the inconvenience,
6.172 staff
Announced on 07 December 2010 8:16 p.m. by John Dong
Project 3 final grades pushed
You can find them in project3_final_grades.txt in your project 3 repositories. Email 6.172-staff@mit.edu with any questions. Sorry for the slow turnaround, but hopefully you find the feedback useful.Announced on 07 December 2010 12:06 a.m. by Reid N Kleckner
