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DEGREE REGULATIONS & PROGRAMMES OF STUDY 2017/2018

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DRPS : Course Catalogue : School of Physics and Astronomy : Postgraduate (School of Physics and Astronomy)

Postgraduate Course: Performance Programming (PGPH11082)

Course Outline
SchoolSchool of Physics and Astronomy CollegeCollege of Science and Engineering
Credit level (Normal year taken)SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) AvailabilityNot available to visiting students
SCQF Credits10 ECTS Credits5
SummaryApplication 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.
Course description Not entered
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
Course Delivery Information
Academic year 2017/18, Not available to visiting students (SS1) Quota:  None
Course Start Semester 2
Timetable Timetable
Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) Total Hours: 100 ( Lecture Hours 13, Seminar/Tutorial Hours 5, Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 2, Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours 80 )
Additional Information (Learning and Teaching) Please contact the School for further information
Assessment (Further Info) Written Exam 0 %, Coursework 100 %, Practical Exam 0 %
Additional Information (Assessment) 100% Coursework
Feedback Not entered
No Exam Information
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.
Reading List
None
Additional Information
Graduate Attributes and Skills Not entered
KeywordsPFP (S2)
Contacts
Course organiserMr William Jackson
Tel:
Email: Adrian.Jackson@ed.ac.uk
Course secretaryMr Ben Morse
Tel: (0131 6)51 3398
Email: Ben.Morse@ed.ac.uk
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