A Crash Course in Modern Hardware by Cliff Click

Cliff Click explains how modern out-of-order CPUs, memory hierarchies, and caches interact, and how these hardware realities affect software performance.

I walk through a tiny performance example on a modern out-of-order CPU, and basically show that (1) single-threaded performance is tapped out, (2) all the action is with multi-threaded programs and (3) the memory subsystem. I discuss the Von Neumann architecture, CISC vs RISC, the rise of multicore, Instruction-Level Parallelism (ILP), pipelining, out-of-order dispatch, static vs dynamic ILP, performance impact of cache misses, memory performance, memory vs CPU caching, examples of memory/CPU cache interaction, and tips for improving performance. Cliff Click is the CTO of Neurensic, and before that the CTO and Co-Founder of h2o.ai, the makers of H2O an open source math and machine learning engine for Big Data. Cliff wrote his first compiler when he was 15 (Pascal to TRS Z-80!), although Cliff’s most famous compiler is the HotSpot Server Compiler (the Sea of Nodes IR). That compiler showed the world that JIT'd high quality code was possible, and was at least partially responsible for bringing Java into the mainstream. Cliff helped Azul Systems build an 864 core pure-Java mainframe that keeps GC pauses on 500Gb heaps to under 10ms, and worked on all aspects of that JVM. Cliff is invited to speak regularly at industry and academic conferences and has published many papers about Hot [PUX-9752]