Outline for Capacity Planning

Week #1 (08/27 - 09/02) - Introduction

• Topics: What is "performance" and why do we care about it? Examples of performance problems taken from the real world. Measures of performance. Performance at a micro and macro level. The capacity planning process. Overview of the course.
• Reading: 1) All course material in folder handed-out in class and 2) preface and Chapter 1 (DL)
• Events: None

Week #2 (09/03 - 09/09) - What causes "performance"

• Topics: Computer system performance - memory hierarchies, context swapping, and other performance determinants. Network performance - bottlenecks, buffering, and other performance determinants. Building a balanced system. Parallelzing applications.
• Reading: None
• Events: HW #1 due 09/06 in class

Week #3 (09/10 - 09/16) - Math review

• Topics: Concepts of random variables and probability distributions. Basic statistics - concepts of populations and samples. Computing mean and variance. Generating histograms. Concept of a time series (trends, cycles, and independence).
• Reading: Chapters 2 and 3 (DL) and summary1.c and hist.c.
• Events: Graduate student project proposals are due in class.

Week #4 (09/17 - 09/23) - Performance measurement

• Topics: How to measure (active versus passive)? Instrumentation. Timing and counting (rate) measurements. Is it significant? Using confidence intervals to determine if a measurement is significant.
• Reading: Chapters 4, 5.1, and 6 (DL), Chapter 4.1 and 4.2 (MM), timeit.c, and ttest.c.
• Events: HW #2 due 09/20 in class

Week #5 (09/24 - 09/30) - Performance measurement tools

• Topics: Perfmon in WindowsNT. SNMP for collecting performance statistics. MRTG and other "cool tools" to use for performance monitoring and measurement. Review for exam #1,
• Reading: None
• Events: None

Week #6 (10/01 - 10/07) - Fundamental principles of queueing theory

• Topics: Queueing as the determinant of performance. Kendall's notation. Fundamentals of queueing including Little's Law. Concept of a performance knee. M/M/1 formulas. Operational analysis. Bottleneck analysis.
• Reading: Chapter 11 (lightly) (DL)
• Events: Exam #1 on 10/04

Week #7 (10/08 - 10/14) - Workloads

• Topics: Characterizing workloads (collecting and crunching). Concept of "burstiness". Generating synthetic workloads (theoretical and empirical distributions). Trace-driven workloads. Classic distributions (Poisson and exponential) and newer heavy-tailed distributions (Pareto). User behavior models for generating workloads. Forecasting future workloads.
• Reading: Appendix B (lightly) (DL), Chapters 1.1 and 1.2 (MM), and genexp.c, genemp.c, lr.c, and smooth1.c.
• Events: HW #3 due 10/11 in class

Week #8 (10/15 - 10/21) - Benchmarks

• Topics: A benchmark as a "canned" workload, experiment, and measurement. What constitutes a "good" benchmark? An overview of existing processor, database, server, and network benchmarks.
• Reading: Chapter 7 (DL)
• Events: None

Week #9 (10/22 - 10/28) - Web server performance - part 1 of 2

• Topics: Web server implementation (HTTP and TCP protocols). Overview of sockets programming and client/server model. Doing and measuring a a "GET" on a Web sever.
• Reading: httpget1.c and weblite.c.
• Events: HW #4 due 10/25

Week #10 (10/29 - 11/04) - Web server performance - part 2 of 2

• Topics: Designing a web server for high performance. Performance tuning and optimization. High-performance web cluster server technologies. Review for exam #2.
• Reading: None
• Events: None

Week #11 (11/05 - 11/11) - Scaling

• Topics: Scaling-up computer systems. Scaling laws. Amdahl's Law. Review for exam #2.
• Reading: None
• Events: Exam #2 on 11/06

Week #12 (11/12 - 11/18) - Building models

• Topics: What is a model and how do we use it? An overview of types of models and how they are used to predict performance.
• Reading: Chapter 10
• Events: None

Week #13 (11/19 - 11/25) - Analytical models

• Topics: Introduction to Markov models for systems of state. Closed form form solutions to Markov models using balance equations and numerical solutions using matrix methods. Deriving the M/M/1 formulas. Classic Erlang blocking formulas.
• Reading: Chapter 11 (yes, read it again) and iter.c.
• Events: HW #5 due 11/20 in class

Week #14 (11/26 - 12/02) - Simulation models - part 1 of 2

• Topics: What is discrete-event simulation? The basic flow chart. Generating random numbers. An introduction to SMPL.
• Reading: Chapters 1 and 2 (MM) and mm1_smpl.c.
• Events: None

Week #15 (12/03 - 12/09) - Simulation models - part 2 of 2

• Topics: More SMPL. Building a model for a single server queue. Building a model for a network of queues. Building a simple model of a server. Calibrating a model. Review for final exam.
• Reading: Chapter 3 (MM)
• Events: HW #6 and graduate student project final submissions due 12/04 in class.

Final Exam - The date for the comprehensive final exam is TBD.