CS 395T: Computer System Performance Analysis

Spring 2025



Given below is the tentative schedule for this course

Lecture # Date Topic Reading
1 Tue, Jan 14 Introduction PIM: Matching in a switch
dcPIM: Matching in a datacenter
Optional:
How to read papers
2 Thu, Jan 16 Class cancelled due to 🛫 --
3 Tue, Jan 21 Class cancelled due to ❄️ --
4 Thu, Jan 23 Load balancing Valiant routing in a switch
Valiant routing in Google's datacenter
Optional:
Original paper by Valiant
5 Tue, Jan 28 Power of two choices Empirical blog
Survey of theory
Optional:
Sparrow scheduler
6 Thu, Jan 30 Notions of fairness I Chapter 2.2 (α-fairness) and 2.4 (NUM) of R. Srikant and Lei Y. (alpha fairness and NUM)
7 Tue, Feb 04 Notions of fairness II Dominant Resource Fairness
8 Thu, Feb 06 Notions of fairness III FairCloud (fairness is hard)
9 Tue, Feb 11 Process scheduling I Work stealing theoretical analysis
Optional:
Cilk programming model
Empirical analysis that concludes work stealing is best
10 Thu, Feb 13 Process scheduling II Decades of wasted cores in Linux
More bugs discovered through verification (section 5 only)
Optional:
Scheduler in Linux v4.6.8.1
11 Tue, Feb 18 When should we use which mathematical operation? Notes
Optional:
L1 vs L2 norms and compressed sensing
12 Thu, Feb 20 Caching replacement policies I Tim Roughgarden's beyond worst-case lecture 3
Tim Roughgarden's beyond worst-case lecture 4
13 Tue, Feb 25 Cache replacement policies II Caching with delayed hits
14 Thu, Feb 27 Incorporating ML in systems I ML improves the average. Theory bounds the worst
15 Tue, Mar 04 Incorporating ML in systems II Traffic engineering by using ML to solve LPs faster
Optional:
Solving computationally hard problems with AlphaZero
16 Thu, Mar 06 Computational complexity in practice I Notes
17 Tue, Mar 11 Computational complexity in practice II Notes
18 Tue, Mar 25 Signal processing tasting menu I Rule: use sinusoids
Learn the rule to break it
19 Thu, Mar 27 Signal processing tasting menu II Funamental Limits (read before 7.1.1 and skim the rest)
Use the limits
20 Tue, Apr 01 Congestion control I AIMD analysis
Delay based multi-bottleneck CC (pay attention to IIIB)
21 Thu, Apr 03 Guest lecture by Tegan Wilson Oblivious reconfigurable networks (sections 3, 4.3, 4.4, and 4.5 are optional)
Real-world version of the above idea in practice
22 Tue, Apr 08 Congestion control II/Performance Verifiaction I Everything is broken
Everything is unfair
23 Thu, Apr 10 Performance verification II How broken are optimizers?
24 Tue, Apr 15 Hardware abstractions for performance I Hardware for sparse linear algebra
25 Thu, Apr 17 Abstractions that aid performance II PIFO
Approximate PIFO
26 Tue, Apr 22 Project presentations I --
27 Thu, Apr 24 Project presentations II --