CS 395T: Computer System Performance Analysis

Spring 2026



Given below is the tentative schedule for this course

Lecture # Date Topic Reading
1 Tue, Jan 13 Introduction Notes: When should we use which operation?
Optional:
How to read papers
L1 vs L2 norms and compressed sensing
2 Thu, Jan 15 Computational complexity in practice I Notes
3 Tue, Jan 20 Computational complexity in practice II Notes
4 Thu, Jan 22 Notions of fairness I Chapter 2.2 (α-fairness) and 2.4 (NUM) of R. Srikant and Lei Y. (alpha fairness and NUM)
Optional:
Frank-Wolfe algorithm
5 Tue, Jan 27 Class cancelled due to ❄️ --
6 Thu, Jan 29 Notions of fairness II Dominant Resource Fairness
7 Tue, Feb 03 Notions of fairness III FairCloud (fairness is hard)
8 Thu, Feb 05 Load balancing Valiant routing in a switch
Valiant routing in Google's datacenter
Optional:
Original paper by Valiant
9 Tue, Feb 10 Power of two choices Empirical blog
Survey of theory
Optional:
Sparrow scheduler
10 Thu, Feb 12 Process scheduling I Work stealing theoretical analysis
Optional:
Cilk programming model
Empirical analysis that concludes work stealing is best
11 Tue, Feb 17 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
12 Thu, Feb 19 Caching replacement policies I Tim Roughgarden's beyond worst-case lecture 3
Tim Roughgarden's beyond worst-case lecture 4
13 Tue, Feb 24 Cache replacement policies II Caching with delayed hits
14 Thu, Feb 26 Incorporating ML in systems I ML improves the average. Theory bounds the worst
15 Tue, Mar 03 Incorporating ML in systems II Traffic engineering by using ML to solve LPs faster
Optional:
Solving computationally hard problems with AlphaZero
16 Thu, Mar 05 Signal processing tasting menu I Rule: use sinusoids
Learn the rule to break it
17 Tue, Mar 10 Signal processing tasting menu II Fundamental Limits (read before 7.1.1 and skim the rest)
Use the limits
18 Thu, Mar 12 Congestion control I AIMD analysis
Delay based multi-bottleneck CC (pay attention to IIIB)
19 Tue, Mar 24 Congestion control II --
20 Thu, Mar 26 Congestion control III/Performance Verifiaction I Everything is broken
Everything is unfair
21 Tue, Mar 31 Performance verification II How broken are optimizers?
22 Thu, Apr 02 Synthesis for Performance --
23 Tue, Apr 07 Multi agent systems I --
24 Thu, Apr 09 Multi agent systems II --
25 Tue, Apr 14 Hardware abstractions for performance I Hardware for sparse linear algebra
26 Thu, Apr 16 Abstractions that aid performance II PIFO
Approximate PIFO
27 Tue, Apr 21 Project presentations I --
28 Thu, Apr 23 Project presentations II --