Weekly reading club - software performance optimisation
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Given the considerable success of the reading group on performance
optimisation of component-based software which ran weekly through last
academic year, we will relaunch starting this coming Thursday 19th
October at 11am in room 418.  We will fix future dates at that
meeting,

The paper for this Thursday is:
    Vasanth Bala, Evelyn Duesterwald and Sanjeev Banerjia,
    "Dynamo: a transparent dynamic optimization system".
    Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN '00 conference on on Programming
    language design and implementation June 18 - 21, 2000, Vancouver, BC Canada
URL: http://www.acm.org/pubs/citations/proceedings/pldi/349299/p1-bala/

Here is my attempt to characterise the focus for the coming year - but
I hope we will let the interests of the participants lead us.  The
general area is software performance optimisation with specific
emphasis on:

  * cross-component optimisation
  * run-time optimisation
  * profile-driven optimisation
  * adaptive optimisation, iterative compilation, self-optimisation, 
    architecture-cognizance
  * the use of metadata, summary information and generating extensions in 
    run-time optimisation

We might also get drawn into

  * performance issues in operating systems and distributed object-oriented
    applications
  * static analysis, especially with respect to pointers, aliasing, escape
    analysis etc
  * custom computing, reconfigurable hardware, codesign, hardware-software
    co-optimisation
  * Optimising communications protocols to reduce the number of messages, and 
    improve concurrency.

This is a development of the 1999-2000 focus on performance
optimisation of component-based software; for details see 
  http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~phjk/ReadingGroups/OptimisingComponents.html

We need your suggestions for suitable papers - I look forward to
hearing from you, and to seeing you - just turn up.

Yours with best wishes

Paul Kelly