Paul Kelly: Undergraduate research opportunities in Software Performance Optimisation

We are looking for up to three students to spend the summer working in the Software Performance Optimisation research group.

To get an idea of what the research group does, have a look at http://www-ala.doc.ic.ac.uk/~phjk/SoftwarePerformanceOptimisation/iSPELHomePage.html

The objective is to involve you in our research work. A successful UROP project should lead to you being a coauthor on a published paper, and/or being responsible for an open-source software release.

Our criterion for selecting you is that you need to be able to get stuck into very complex software, and make it work.

How to apply:

If you're interested, please send me an email with a very short explanation of your main technical achievements, and the research area you're most excited about - and we'll fix a time to meet.

Specific project ideas include:

Distributed Java:

• Evaluate a tool which we are developing for optimising the performance of a distributed Java application at run-time; collect a suite of benchmark applications which exercise the tool and measure how well it works (and if it doesn't, figure out why).

• Build a tool for analysing the performance of distributed Java programs

• Build a tool for making sure that when you distribute Java software components, the users only assemble them into configurations which are likely to work

• Build a run-time specialiser for Java, which optimises programs by specialising them to the context in which they are being used

• Build a program generator which automatically finds the fastest possible implementation of a user-specified numerical loop. Study how to choose the best execution order (tiling), how to vectorise (using MMX, 3DNow etc), and how to organise storage - and how to combine all these automatically to fit the user's problem to the machine they have. (This is based on the TaskGraph library, see /homes/phjk/OldStudentProjects/AlastairHoughton/TaskGraph/ )

• Build a tool for combining TaskGraphs (see above) to yield the best possible implementation of a sequence of pre-optimised library functions

• Evaluate these ideas, eg in visualisation of fluid flow or in an adaptive mesh refinement solver (see http://www.llnl.gov/CASC/SAMRAI/movies.html)

• Build an event-driven simulator of a wide-area network out of commodity Linux software. Model how routing information is propagated, how type-of-service (TOS) information is used to provide differentiated services. Validate. Simplify.

• We have developed a tool for on-the-fly instrumentation of the Linux kernel. Build a GUI for it, add data analysis, apply it to some interesting Linux performance issues, extend it to work on user-mode code, multiprocessors, etc.