Data-Oriented Design and Programming for Performance

Abstract

Modern computers provide incredible amounts of power to perform computation. In order to fully realize this power however, programmers must understand different layers of both hardware and software. In this lecture we will investigate strategies on how to take advantage of modern hardware by writing programs with a data-oriented design in mind. The goal is for attendees to leave knowing a few "low hanging fruit" strategies for improving the performance of their programs by learning a little bit of hardware. We will investigate familiar data structures such as linked-lists and arrays to try understand how the data structures we select impact the performance. Finally, at the end of this talk, we will summarize tools which can help us measure the performance of our programs.