
Performance Analyst at Sun Microsystems Inc.
San Francisco Bay Area

Performance Analyst at Sun Microsystems Inc.
San Francisco Bay Area
I work on the analysis of application performance on current and future systems. At one level this means looking at the profiles of applications or benchmarks, and then determining whether there are ways through modification of the source code, or the build process that the performance of the application can be improved. The more interesting questions are what is limiting performance for a given code running on a particular system, and whether it's possible to change the code, improve the compiler, or change the characteristics of the hardware to improve performance.
When I'm not looking at code, I'm usually writing. I regularly contribute articles to the developer portal, and maintain a blog on developer/performance issues.
My second book "The Developer's Edge" came out in March 2009. This is a collection of blog posts and articles that I've written, plus a number of from other contributors at Sun. The content of the book is relevant for developers, covering hardware, languages, threading etc.
In 2008 my first book "Solaris Application Programming" was published by Prentice-Hall. This book covers the areas that I think it's important to understand when developing and optimising software. The book discusses hardware characteristics, the Sun Studio tools as well as the other tools available on Solaris, optimisation and performance tuning, before ending with a section on writing multi-threaded codes.
In 2008 I also provided a chapter to the book "OpenSPARC Internals", which is a companion book to the open source OpenSPARC processors released by Sun. Further details on the processors can be found at opensparc.net.
Of late, much of my interest is in multi-threaded applications. My blog is a fairly good indicator of both my current interests and recent presentations.
C/C++/Fortran, assembly language, SPARC, x86, computer architecture, performance analysis, multithreading, technical leadership.