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Welcome to Barcelona (for my foreign friends)
Barcelona, located at the Mediterranean sea in the very north of the Spanish coast, is certainly the most cosmopolitan and economically most active city in Spain. Barcelona is the capital of Catalonia with a 7 millions of population. It has always proved its will to be modern, to follow the latest international tendencies or be ahead of them. To the tourist this is evident specially in its architecture, which so well reflects the general approach to life in this always pulsating city.
Since its foundation over 2000 years ago, the city has served as been the traditional gateway of Spain. Romans, Arabs and Christians have all passed through, leaving their distinct mark on the city. The visitor will gain a sense of Barcelona’s history simply by walking through the city, whether roaming the streets of the Gothic Quarter, built on the original Roman site or the Modernist Eixample district that is illuminated by the exuberant architecture of Antoni Gaudí.
Such diversity and harmony also flourishes in the character of Barcelona’s citizens. Enterprising and hard-working, they also possess a hedonistic streak along with strong civic pride and a love for culture. These traits have made Barcelona into a first-class tourist destination and the perfect setting for meetings and congresses. This open, welcoming city which hosted the Olympic Games in 1992 is now focusing all its energies on another global project: the Universal Forum of Cultures, which is being held in 2004 and will enable the city to complete its seafront area.
Barcelona enjoys a mild climate and an average annual temperature of 17 degrees Celsius. The sun shines on most days of the year and the Mediterranean brings cooling sea breezes to the city and moisture to the atmosphere. Rainfall is light, except during the few rainy months of the year, and needless to say, it rarely snows. Even the lowest temperatures are relatively mild. At June, one can expect temperatures of approximately 25 degrees Celsius.
UPC Information: http://www.upc.edu/eng/practical_info
Information on Barcelona: http://www.bcn.es/turisme/english/turisme
Information on surroundings: http://www.gencat.net/turistex_nou/home_ang.htm
A good reason to visit us: 
EUROPE’S COOLEST CITIES: Barcelona’s Sense and Sensuality. By Helene Zuber, (from SPIEGEL Online International) http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,502312,00.html .
Com contactar
Technical University of Catalonia:
Jordi Torres
UPC, Campus Nord, Modul C6 - 217
C/ Jordi Girona, 1-3. E-08034 Barcelona (Spain)
Phone: (+34) 93 401 7223
email: torres (at) ac.upc.edu
Barcelona Supercomputing Center:
Jordi Torres
BSC-CNS. Nexus II Building
c/ Jordi Girona, 29
08034 Barcelona (Spain)
Phone: (+34) 93 413 7716
Fax: (+34) 93 413 77 21
email: jordi.torres (at) bsc.es
Spype: Jordi.Torres
Facebook: http://es-es.facebook.com/people/Jordi-Torres/538908279
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jorditorresvinyals
.Tel: JordiTorres.tel
Google Maps: http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=41.39+++2.113&layer=&ie=UTF8&z=12&om=1
How to reach my office: My office is in Campus Nord of UPC:
UPC Campus Nord, Modul C6-217
Jordi Girona 1-3
E-08034 Barcelona ( taxi map)
This is located at the Northwest end of Barcelona, not far from Diagonal avenue.
By Plane:
Barcelona airport is at 12 Km from the city. More information about Barcelona’s airport: www.aena.es. You can arrive with a taxi. In front of every terminal you will find a taxi stand. If they are available, they will show a green light with the text LIBRE or LLIURE (it means “available”). The approximate travel price to UPC campus Nord is around 35 €. Show this google map to the taxi driver to reach the UPC campus.
If you rent a car from the airport, please leave “El Prat del Llobregat” and take C-32B. Continue along this route and head towards Ronda de Dalt / Lleida / Girona. Close to Barcelona, take route C-32 passing close to Cornellà del Llobregat and L’Hospitalet. Take B-20 and take Exit 10 called “Carretera d’Esplugues”. Take the street called “carrer del Gran Capità” and turn left towards Sor Eulàlia d’Anzizu street (See this google map).
From downtown:
The most convenient access is by metro:
- Get on Line 3 (green color), direction Zona Universitària. Exit at the last-but-one stop, Palau Reial. This takes 20-25 minutes from the center (e.g., Plaça Catalunya stop).
- At the platform, it doesn’t matter whether you take the front or back exit. But after you pass the ticket counters, make sure you walk to the farthest exit, then left.
- Make a right on the corner of the Palau Reial palace, walk uphill along its plain-looking wall, cross the street. Walk over to the c6 building . Total walking time is 8-10 minutes.
- My office is 217 in floor 2.
- The Zona Universitària metro stop is almost as close. If you like buses better, final stops of lines 7, 33, and 54 are also nearby.
- Hopefully the map above makes it clear.
Also you could take a taxi. Show this google map location to the taxi driver to reach the UPC campus.
My phone again, just in case: (+34) 93 401 7223.
General:
Please visit my post Welcome to Barcelona.
System Performance Evaluation (CARS-FIB): Performance Analysis Part
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