Parallel and High Performance Computing

4 Data design and performance models

This chapter covers

• Why real applications struggle to achieve performance
• Addressing kernels and loops that significantly underperform
• Choosing data structures for your application
• Assessing different programming approaches before writing code
• Understanding how the cache hierarchy delivers data to the processor

This chapter has two topics that are intimately coupled: (1) the introduction of performance models increasingly dominated by data movement and, thus, necessarily (2) the underlying design and structure of data. Although it may seem secondary to performance, the data structure and its design are critical. This must be determined in advance because it dictates the entire form of the algorithms, code, ...