Dear CARS students, Welcome on board. In this course I will teach the Performance Analysis part which is divided into two sections (section 2 and 5 of the course). Following you can find the tentative scheduling:
PART 1 : EVALUATION AND MEASUREMENT TECHNIQUES
1. INTRODUCTION TO PERFORMANCE CONCEPTS
1.1. Basic Concepts of Performance Measurement
LAB 1: System utilities for performance monitoring
2. PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS BASICS
2.1. Queuing concepts
2.2. Basic concepts of Operational Analysis
LAB 2: Quantitative performance analysis of system components
2.3. The usefulness of Operational Laws
LAB 3: Predicting the impact of changing system components
3. PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT TECHNIQUES
3.1. Program Instrumentation Tools
3.2. Program Characterization and Data Selection
3.3. Other Measurement Techniques: Simulation and VM
LAB 4: Building tools to evaluate application performance
LAB 5: Program characterization based on parallelism degree and memory accesses
PART 2: MODELLING AND CHARACTERIZATION
4. PERFORMANCE IN DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING SYSTEMS
4.1. Introduction to distributed computing
4.2. System-centric performance management
4.3 User-centric performance management
LAB 6: System-centric performance management
LAB 7: User-centric performance management
5. A GLANCE AT MODELLING AND PREDICTING TODAY SYSTEMS
5.1. Brief review of concepts applied to today systems
5.2. Bottlenecks and scalability by examples
LAB 8: Optimizing resources usage while fulfilling an SLA
5.3. Advanced application of modelling: real-time performance prediction
6. BENCHMARKING AND WORKLOAD CHARACTERIZATION
6.1. Benchmarking
6.2. Workload characterization
LAB 9: HTTP server log analysis
LAB 10: Performance competition
For the documentation of this part (sections 2 and 5) I will be using this web page that allows the information to be kept more organized. Basic information for this class (including homework assignments, some materials presented in class, additional support material) and the current course outline is available from this page and it is also published as:
J. Torres. “A glance at SYSTEM PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS“. Ed. Lulu Interprises, London. ISBN 978-1-4092-2916-2. 2008.
This course material is composed of the set of slides presented in class and the laboratory task descriptions which are in the performance analysis part of the System Performance Evaluation (CARS) graduate course at the Barcelona School of Informatics (FIB).
The broad objective of these notes is to study the theory by using examples and hands-on practice in the performance analysis of a system. It will give a quick review of the mathematical techniques that can be used for performance analysis of todays systems, reviewing techniques that have been widely used. It is impossible to provide an in-depth treatment of the vast areas covered in this part of the course though, because we only have about 20 hours available.
To achieve the course objectives of this part, the student must have good class attendance and participation, conduct the tasks during the laboratory periods as well as the assigned homework. Before coming to the laboratory sessions it is required that the case study is read carefully, thought about, fully understood and that an attempt is made to mark the relevant data.
Many people have contributed to the work included in this document. First of all, part of this material is extracted from others courses. We want to especially thank professors Virgilio A. F. Almeida (Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil) and Xavier Mulero (Universitat Politècnica de Valencia, Spain) for their contribution at the beginning of this set of slides which comes from a course in 2005. The first version of the slides for this course mainly used the slides that professor Almeida taught in our PhD program in 2003 and the slides that professor Mulero used in a course on performance in 2004. We also used some slides obtained or inspired from several courses devoted to these topics in other universities around the world. It is impossible to enumerate all the authors, however we are also especially thankful to every one of them. Furthermore, I would like to thank my research team at UPC and BSC for their hard work on many interesting projects in this field that gave us some of the input for this material.
Finally I ask the students to keep in mind that none of the professors are native English speakers. Please be kind if you find some mistakes that may escape our revisions.
I hope you enjoy this course.
HANDOUTS: http://www.frombarcelona.org/JordiTorresHomePage/2007/08/17/cars-handouts/
Official web page: http://www.fib.upc.edu/en/infoAca/estudis/assignatures/CARS.html
