Greetings, members.
The University of Waterloo Computer Science Club hereby cordially
invites you to attend a talk by Herb Sutter on the topics of Machine
Architecture, Performance, and Scalability. Herb's talk will be held on
Thursday, February 28th at 4:30 PM in DC 1302.
An abstract:
Machine Architecture, Performance, and Scalability: Things Your
Programming Language Never Told You.
High-level languages insulate the programmer from the machine. That's a
wonderful thing -- except when it obscures the answers to the
fundamental questions of "What does the program do?" and "How much does
it cost?"
The C++ and C# programmer is less insulated than most, and still we find
that programmers are consistently surprised at what simple code actually
does and how expensive it can be -- not because of any complexity of a
language, but because of being unaware of the complexity of the machine
on which the program actually runs.
This talk examines the "real meanings" and "true costs" of the code we
write and run, especially on commodity and server systems, by delving
into the performance effects of bandwidth vs. latency limitations, the
ever-deepening memory hierarchy, the changing costs arising from the
hardware concurrency explosion, memory model effects all the way from
the compiler to the CPU to the chipset to the cache, and more -- and
what you can do about them.
----
Herb Sutter is an influential authority on software development using
C++ and concurrency. He is the best selling author of Exceptional C++
and three other books, along with hundreds of technical papers and
articles including the widely-cited essay "The Free Lunch Is Over" which
described the software sea change now in progress to exploit
increasingly parallel hardware. He is chair of the ISO C++ standards
committee and chief native languages architect at Microsoft.
If you have received this message twice, we apologise.
Cheers,
Calum T. Dalek
Chairbeing Extraordinaire
Computer Science Club
University of Waterloo
