Mechanical Sympathy: The Software/Hardware Divide

Software and hardware are like two sides of the same coin. One doesn’t make sense without the other. No matter which domain you work in, you should have an understanding of the other side. But what does understanding mean? What can software engineers learn to help extract the most out of the hardware their applications run on?

This track will look at the boundary between hardware and software. What are capabilities that the hardware provides we can take advantage of? What are the challenges to look out for? How do we create/apply new tools and techniques to deal with all the latest trends in hardware to extract maximum performance from our systems?

TRACK HOST

Ed Hunter

Engineering Leader @Netflix

Ed Hunter is an Engineering Director at Netflix running the Performance and Demand engineering teams. These two teams build the tools and techniques to help the Netflix microservice owners ensure their services run as efficiently and reliably as possible with the resources they need. Prior to Netflix Ed was at Juniper Networks running the FreeBSD team for JunOS. Before that he spent many years at Sun Microsystems working on first SunOS and then Solaris. While at Sun he also spent time on advanced development projects for Sunsoft. Towards the end of his time at Sun he did some research in datacenter cooling. Throughout his career he has always had an interest in finding ways to extract the maximum amount of performance from hardware.

Find Ed Hunter at:

TRACK HOST Ed Hunter Engineering Leader @Netflix

From this track

Session

Improving Video Encoding System Efficiency @Netflix

Wednesday Nov 18 / 09:00AM PST

Every show on Netflix is encoded for the device type and bit rate that is optimal for the customers. For any one show that can be tens of different encodes, generated by a large-scale system that scales up to hundreds of thousands of CPU cores concurrently. As the performance team at Netflix, we...

Susie Xia Senior Performance Engineer @Netflix

Session

It’s Not Your Machine; It’s Your Code.

Wednesday Nov 18 / 09:50AM PST

Can we use information in tweets to decide how and when to trade stocks? Yes. But can we do this efficiently at scale, and on a tight budget? Well, this talk will discuss what such a task entails. We will look at some of the performance issues encountered in a simulated high frequency trading...

Adekunle Adepoju Senior Software Engineer @Netflix

Session

Pragmatic Performance - Tales from the Trenches

Wednesday Nov 18 / 10:40AM PST

In industry, one if often required to retrofit existing systems to extract more performance out of them. These performance optimization efforts are also performed under deadlines that make the "best'' solution, however attractive, often infeasible. In this talk, we would like to...

Ramesh Subramonian Principal Engineer @TargetNews

Interactive Session

Mechanical Sympathy Panel

Wednesday Nov 18 / 11:30AM PST

In this panel, we’ll continue the conversation about mechanical sympathy by bringing our speakers back to discuss where they see future trends and new ideas they have yet to try. We will touch on new tools that can provide even better insights into what is happening in our systems. We will...

Susie Xia Senior Performance Engineer @Netflix Adekunle Adepoju Senior Software Engineer @Netflix Ramesh Subramonian Principal Engineer @TargetNews

3 weeks of live software engineering content designed around your schedule.

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