The art of writing efficient programs : an advanced programmer's guide to efficient hardware utilization and compiler optimizations using C++ examples / Fedor G. Pikus.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pikus, Fedor G., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Computer programming.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (465 pages)

Place of Publication:

Birmingham, England ; Mumbai : Packt Publishing, [2021]

Biography/History:

Pikus Fedor G. : Fedor G. Pikus is a Technical Fellow and head of the Advanced Projects Team in Siemens Digital Industries Software. His responsibilities include planning the long-term technical direction of Calibre products, directing and training the engineers who work on these products, design, and architecture of the software, and researching new design and software technologies. His earlier positions included a Chief Scientist at Mentor Graphics (acquired by Siemens Software), a Senior Software Engineer at Google, and a Chief Software Architect for Calibre Design Solutions at Mentor Graphics. He joined Mentor Graphics in 1998 when he made a switch from academic research in computational physics to the software industry. Fedor is a recognized expert in high-performance computing and C++. He is the author of two books on C++ and software design, has presented his works at CPPNow, CPPCon, SD West, DesignCon, and in software development journals, and is also an O'Reilly author. Fedor has over 30 patents and over 100 papers and conference presentations on physics, EDA, software design, and C++ language.

Summary:

Become a better programmer with performance improvement techniques such as concurrency, lock-free programming, atomic operations, parallelism, and memory managementKey FeaturesLearn proven techniques from a heavyweight and recognized expert in C++ and high-performance computingUnderstand the limitations of modern CPUs and their performance impactFind out how you can avoid writing inefficient code and get the best optimizations from the compilerLearn the tradeoffs and costs of writing high-performance programsBook DescriptionThe great free lunch of "performance taking care of itself" is over. Until recently, programs got faster by themselves as CPUs were upgraded, but that doesn't happen anymore. The clock frequency of new processors has almost peaked, and while new architectures provide small improvements to existing programs, this only helps slightly. To write efficient software, you now have to know how to program by making good use of the available computing resources, and this book will teach you how to do that. The Art of Efficient Programming covers all the major aspects of writing efficient programs, such as using CPU resources and memory efficiently, avoiding unnecessary computations, measuring performance, and how to put concurrency and multithreading to good use. You'll also learn about compiler optimizations and how to use the programming language (C++) more efficiently. Finally, you'll understand how design decisions impact performance. By the end of this book, you'll not only have enough knowledge of processors and compilers to write efficient programs, but you'll also be able to understand which techniques to use and what to measure while improving performance. At its core, this book is about learning how to learn.What you will learnDiscover how to use the hardware computing resources in your programs effectivelyUnderstand the relationship between memory order and memory barriersFamiliarize yourself with the performance implications of different data structures and organizationsAssess the performance impact of concurrent memory accessed and how to minimize itDiscover when to use and when not to use lock-free programming techniquesExplore different ways to improve the effectiveness of compiler optimizationsDesign APIs for concurrent data structures and high-performance data structures to avoid inefficienciesWho this book is forThis book is for experienced developers and programmers who work on performance-critical projects and want to learn new techniques to improve the performance of their code. Programmers in algorithmic trading, gaming, bioinformatics, computational genomics, or computational fluid dynamics communities will get the most out of the examples in this book, but the techniques are fairly universal. Although this book uses the C++ language, the concepts demonstrated in the book can be easily transferred or applied to other compiled languages such as C, Java, Rust, Go, and more.

Contents:

Cover

Title Page

Copyright and Credits

Contributors

Table of Contents

Preface

Section 1 - Performance Fundamentals

Chapter 1: Introduction to Performance and Concurrency

Why focus on performance?

Why performance matters

What is performance?

Performance as throughput

Performance as power consumption

Performance for real-time applications

Performance as dependent on context

Evaluating, estimating, and predicting performance

Learning about high performance

Summary

Questions

Chapter 2: Performance Measurements

Technical requirements

Performance measurements by example

Performance benchmarking

C++ chrono timers

High-resolution timers

Performance profiling

The perf profiler

Detailed profiling with perf

The Google Performance profiler

Profiling with call graphs

Optimization and inlining

Practical profiling

Micro-benchmarking

Basics of micro-benchmarking

Micro-benchmarking and compiler optimizations

Google Benchmark

Micro-benchmarks are lies

Chapter 3: CPU Architecture, Resources, and Performance

The performance begins with the CPU

Probing performance with micro-benchmarks

Visualizing instruction-level parallelism

Data dependencies and pipelining

Pipelining and branches

Branch prediction

Profiling for branch mispredictions

Speculative execution

Optimization of complex conditions

Branchless computing

Loop unrolling

Branchless selection

Branchless computing examples

Chapter 4: Memory Architecture and Performance

The performance begins with the CPU but does not end there

Measuring memory access speed

Memory architecture

Measuring memory and cache speeds

The speed of memory: the numbers.

The speed of random memory access

The speed of sequential memory access

Memory performance optimizations in hardware

Optimizing memory performance

Memory-efficient data structures

Profiling memory performance

Optimizing algorithms for memory performance

The ghost in the machine

What is Spectre?

Spectre by example

Spectre, unleashed

Chapter 5: Threads, Memory, and Concurrency

Understanding threads and concurrency

What is a thread?

Symmetric multi-threading

Threads and memory

Memory-bound programs and concurrency

Understanding the cost of memory synchronization

Why data sharing is expensive

Learning about concurrency and order

The need for order

Memory order and memory barriers

Memory order in C++

Memory model

Section 2 - Advanced Concurrency

Chapter 6: Concurrency and Performance

What is needed to use concurrency effectively?

Locks, alternatives, and their performance

Lock-based, lock-free, and wait-free programs

Different locks for different problems

Lock-based versus lock-free, what is the real difference?

Building blocks for concurrent programming

The basics of concurrent data structures

Counters and accumulators

Publishing protocol

Smart pointers for concurrent programming

Chapter 7: Data Structures for Concurrency

What is a thread-safe data structure?

The best kind of thread safety

The real thread safety

The thread-safe stack

Interface design for thread safety

Performance of mutex-guarded data structures

Performance requirements for different uses

Stack performance in detail

Performance estimates for synchronization schemes

Lock-free stack.

The thread-safe queue

Lock-free queue

Non-sequentially consistent data structures

Memory management for concurrent data structures

The thread-safe list

Lock-free list

Chapter 8: Concurrency in C++

Concurrency support in C++11

Concurrency support in C++17

Concurrency support in C++20

The foundations of coroutines

Coroutine C++ syntax

Coroutine examples

Section 3 - Designing and Coding High-Performance Programs

Chapter 9: High-Performance C++

What is the efficiency of a programming language?

Unnecessary copying

Copying and argument passing

Copying as an implementation technique

Copying to store data

Copying of return values

Using pointers to avoid copying

How to avoid unnecessary copying

Inefficient memory management

Unnecessary memory allocations

Memory management in concurrent programs

Avoiding memory fragmentation

Optimization of conditional execution

Chapter 10: Compiler Optimizations in C++

Compilers optimizing code

Basics of compiler optimizations

Function inlining

What does the compiler really know?

Lifting knowledge from runtime to compile time

Chapter 11: Undefined Behavior and Performance

What is undefined behavior?

Why have undefined behavior?

Undefined behavior and C++ optimization

Using undefined behavior for efficient design

Chapter 12: Design for Performance

Interaction between the design and performance

Design for performance

The minimum information principle

The maximum information principle

API design considerations

API design for concurrency.

Copying and sending data

Design for optimal data access

Performance trade-offs

Interface design

Component design

Errors and undefined behavior

Making informed design decisions

Assessments

Chapter 1:

Chapter 2:

Chapter 3:

Chapter 4:

Chapter 5:

Chapter 6:

Chapter 7:

Chapter 8:

Chapter 9:

Chapter 10:

Chapter 11:

Chapter 12:

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Index.

Notes:

Includes index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-80020-274-1

OCLC:

1276852437