6.172 Performance Engineering of Software Systems

Introduction to building scalable and high-performance software systems. Topics include performance analysis, algorithmic techniques for high performance, instruction-level optimizations, caching optimizations, parallel programming, and building scalable systems.

Installation

NixOS (recommended)

To ensure a reproducible environment (e.g. all packages work without build errors), we recommend you use the Nix environment setup.

1. Install nix
2. Activate the environment by running nix-shell (or more explicitly nix-shell shell.nix) from the project root directory. This will create a virtual environment with all the necessary pkgs and system information (defined in the shell.nix file) required to properly build and run each executable.

Manual

If Nix is unavailable on your system or you wish to not use it, you have to download the following packages globally or locally (in a virtual env). Ensure the path to the binaries are added to your PATH.

cmake
clang

# optional: profiling
llvm (for symbolization)
pprof
gperftools
graphviz

# optional: graphics
x11 (or XQuartz for macos)

# optional: parallel
openmp

Building

To build with default flags, follow the canonical cmake build process,

1. Install dependencies and activate shell env (see Installation)
2. Create build directory: mkdir build/
3. Generate OS-specific build files: cmake -Bbuild -GNinja
4. Build executables: Run ninja for each project/submodule inside build/
5. Run each executable

Alternatively, you may wish to (re)compile each project with other flags (e.g. debug, profiling). To do this globally across all submodules, add the -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug and -DPROFILE_BUILD=On flags when generating the build files, respectively.

For enabling project-specific compilation flags (e.g. X11 graphics), you may define the flags on the command line as well (see options in each individual project's CMakeFiles.txt)

Linting

To automatically make sure if a C file follows Google's C style guide, download the following file.

The linting tool takes a list of files as input. For full usage instructions, please see the output of:

./clint.py --help

Notes

Although CilkPlus is now deprecated in favor of OpenCilk, we choose to use OpenMP for shared-memory parallel programming. The primary reason is cross-compatabilty (as OpenCilk doesn't work on Windows) and requires downloading the Tapir/LLVM compiler. Additionally, rather than deal with low-level instructions (e.g. pthreads), OpenMP provides a very simple interface to parallelize serial code without much overhead.

The code in this repository is (likely) not optimally written or of production quality. It is currently also not well tested (no extensive unit, integration, or performance tests).

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dr. Charles Leiserson, Dr. Julian Shun, and MIT opencourseware for providing access to the videos, slides, assignments, and projects from the F2018 version of the class.