• 8/22 : Updated assignment pdf to reflect correct due date of Aug 28.
• First day of class Tuesday, Aug 21, 2:30PM GY 436

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to) the following:

1. Complexities of getting reliable and context-sensitive timings on actual hardware in the real world.
2. Overviews of several architecture areas critical to optimization, including memory hierarchy, pipelining, superscalar exploitation, etc.
3. Application of traditional optimizations (as used in compilers, but here performed by hand), on various architectures including: software pipelining, superscalar scheduling, scalar expansion, blocking/tiling, and various array optimizations (contiguous vs. strided vs. pointer to pointer access, TLB issues, etc).
4. Basics of assembly programming (particularly x86) -- necessary to do extremely low-level optimization, including SSE.
5. Exploiting low-level architectural features, including SSE and prefetch.

• 85-95% programming projects, including final project/presentation
• 0-10% written/oral quizzes,
• 5% class participation
• No written final

If I feel that students are not fully engaged by the programming projects, I will put more emphasis on written testing:

• 60% programming projects, including final project
• 35% written exams, including final exam
• 5% class participation

Students with disabilities:
If you have a physical, psychological, medical or learning disability that may impact on your ability to carry out assigned course work, I would urge that you contact Disability Services for Students (DSS), Herman B Wells Library, Suite W, 812-855-7578 (Voice), 812-855-7650 (Fax), iubdss@indiana.edu, homepage. Please bring a letter to me from DSS indicating your need for academic accommodations within the first week of class. The syllabus and other class materials can be made available in alternative format upon request.

Academic Integrity:
Remember that the goal of programming or written assignments is to enhance your programming skills and understanding of the topics under discussion. Thus indulging in academic dishonesty results in poor understanding of the material as well as being unfair to other students. In case you have any questions about whether an act of collaboration may be construed as academic dishonesty, please clarify the issue with the instructor before you collaborate. Academic dishonesty can result in a grade of 'F'.

• It is understandable that discussing a problem with other people may lead to more insight into the issues involved. Thus discussing a problem in assignments/homeworks in a general way with other people is fine. However, discussing the solutions to the problem or showing/examining actual code is NOT acceptable.
• Every student must write his/her own code and homework. Showing your code or homework to members of other teams, giving it to them, or making it accessible to them (e.g., by making the files world-readable) is academic dishonesty.
• You are responsible for ensuring that your code/documentation/results are adequately protected and not accessible to other teams. Change permissions of your working directory to 0700 ('chmod 0700 <directory>).
• Consulting code from a textbook, or from the Internet, in order to understand specific aspects of your assignment is fine. However, copying entire code or large parts of such code will be considered academic dishonesty. If you borrow small parts of code from these sources, you must acknowledge this in your submission and additionally you must clearly understand and be able to explain how the code works. If you cannot explain your own code in detail, it will be graded as zero.

As for the topic, this course covers the the basics of high performance optimization in the real world. If you chose this computing because you love to code, if you wonder how the machine really works in practice, and how the computer architecture you have read about affects actual execution, then this is the course for you. An interest in low-level computing and programming is required for success.

The programming assignments are designed to help you understand how to achieve high performance in the real world. You will be able to see the effects of optimization immediately, and will find that formerly abstract concepts come into much greater focus (and are a good deal more enjoyable in implementation) when their application results in noticable speedups on real-world kernels. This more concrete understanding should allow you to more fully grasp principles of critical importance in architecture, compilers, and high performance computing.

We will also learn applied assembly in this course. While the days of wholesale assembly coding are mostly over, embedded systems and tight kernel loops must often still be programmed in assembly for decent performance, as we will see. More generally, knowing assembly allows a compiler writer to better tune the compilation framework, the embedded coder to fit tight machine constraints, and the systems programmer to diagnose performance (or indeed fatal) bugs caused by compilers.

Finally, there is quite a bit of fun in just making things run fast. This is the modern day equivalent of learning how to soup up your family sedan so that it can run at 350 MPH: only a very few people actually need to do it, but it sure is neat. If you've ever wanted to sneer at the local gentoo linux user as "doing the best an uninformed noob can hope for, I guess", then this is certainly the class for you.

Useful Links:

• ATLAS assembly page.
• ATLAS architecture page.
• Agner Fog's excellent x86 optimization page.

• Download PuTTY to access LSU Linux sytems from your home Windows computer
  • For Linux or MacOS X, you should be able to open a terminal window and ssh your_csc_login@classes.csc.lsu.edu.
• Helpful docs from undergrad classes:
  • Very basic intro to linux
  • comments on vim usage
• UNIX Tutorial for Beginners
• Clickable list of Linux commands
• DOS to Linux command cheat sheet
• Some (google can find a lot more) vim cheatsheats/quick reference guides:
  • simple online cheatsheat
  • printable vim quick reference guide
  • Graphical cheatsheat