Ruud van der Pas

Senior Principal Software Engineer, Oracle Linux Engineering. The Netherlands.

“Performance Tuning is Hard and That is Why You Should Do It“

Abstract

There are many misconceptions about application performance tuning and unfortunately they are often not only outdated, but sometimes plain wrong from the start. They are also rather persistent.

We start with a biased overview of the main misconceptions and share the presenter’s take on them. This is followed by a coverage of the real challenges that those interested in application performance tuning face.

Many applications have low hanging fruit when it comes to improving the performance, but the definition of low depends on how tall you are. We conclude with a case study that demonstrates this. While the fixes are easy, without the proper knowledge there would be no way to get the remarkable performance improvement realized.

Bio

Ruud is a Senior Principal Software Engineer in the Oracle Linux and Virtualization engineering organization at Oracle Corporation.

He operates on a world-wide basis. His key area of expertise is in parallel computing, in particular on shared memory systems using OpenMP. He has been involved with OpenMP from the start and has extensive experience in highly scalable shared memory performance on various types of algorithms, including graph analysis.

He also regularly gives technical presentations and tutorials at conferences and workshops.

Ruud has studied mathematics and physics and has been involved with the performance of technical applications for 25+ years. Before joining Oracle he worked at Sun Microsystems, SGI, Convex Computer Corporation, the University of Utrecht and Phillips.

He is also a board member of IDC’s HPC Advisory Committee, regularly receives invitations to be on the program committee of international conferences and has a strong interest in Interval Analysis and Interval Arithmetic.

Ruud’s current area of interest is the gprofng application profiling tool that is part of the GNU binutils tool suite. In addition to his code development work, he is actively involved with the promotion of this tool, including giving presentations.

Ruud has published over 20 conference papers related to application tuning and parallelization, several technical white papers and is co-author of the books “Using OpenMP”, and “Using OpenMP – The Next Step”, both published by MIT Press.

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