CppCon 2016: Timur Doumler “Want fast C++? Know your hardware!"

Timur Doumler explains how modern hardware properties like cache locality, branch prediction, and SIMD impact C++ performance.

CppCon.org — Presentation Slides, PDFs, Source Code and other presenter materials are available at: github.com/cppcon/cppcon2016 — As C++ evolves, it provides us with better and more powerful tools for optimal performance. But often, knowing the language very well is not enough. It is just as important to know your hardware. Modern computer architectures have many properties that can impact the performance of C++ code, such as cache locality, cache associativity, true and false sharing between cores, memory alignment, the branch predictor, the instruction pipeline, denormals, and SIMD. In this talk, I will give an overview over these properties, using C++ code. I will present a series of code examples, highlighting different effects, and benchmark their performance on different machines with different compilers, sometimes with surprising results. The talk will draw a picture of what every C++ developer needs to know about hardware architecture, provide guidelines on how to write modern C++ code that is cache-friendly, pipeline-friendly, and well-vectorisable, and highlight what to look for when profiling it. — Timur Doumler ROLI Ltd. JUCE Senior Software Engineer London, UK Timur Doumler is Senior Software Developer at London-based technology company ROLI. He is currently working on JUCE, the leading cross-platform framework for creating audio applications used by hundreds of companies in the audio industry. After five years of writing high-performance code in Fortran, C, and C++ for numerical simulations of the cosmic structure formation, Timur became committed to audio and music production software. Before joining ROLI, he worked on various projects at market-leading company Native Instruments, such as KONTAKT, the industry standard sampling platform used by the majority of music producers and composers for film score, games, and contemporary popular music. Timur holds a PhD in astrophysics and is passionate about well-written code, modern C++ techniques, science-fiction, learning languages, and progressive rock music. — Videos Filmed & Edited by Bash Films: BashFilms.com Work at Hudson River Trading (HRT): tinyurl.com/safxfctf