Keynotes
Sven Apel, Professor of Computer Science, Saarland University
Title: Software Performance Modelling in Spacetime
Almost any practical software system today is configurable. A configurable software system provides a set of configuration options to adjust and optimize its functional and non-functional properties. In particular, a system's performance behavior often depends in intricate ways on individual configuration options as well as interactions among them. This complex behavior renders tasks such as identifying performance-critical options, deploying performance-optimal configurations, and pinning down reasons for performance regression challenging. Clearly, any practical performance modelling technique needs to take the dimension of configurability into account (space dimension). But this is only one side of the coin. Software systems evolve and so do their (configuration-dependent) performance behaviors (time dimension).
In this talk, I will review recent and ongoing work on modelling performance of configurable software systems. While early approaches concentrated on modelling performance across the configuration space, more recent approaches incorporate the evolution of the software system in question, effectively modelling the system's performance behavior in spacetime. Besides discussing the key ideas in this area, I will highlight challenges that arise from the interplay between configuration sampling and performance learning, the uncertainty that is inherent in performance measurement and behavior, and the interaction of workload-dependent and configuration-dependent behavior.
Short bio
Prof. Dr. Sven Apel holds the Chair of Software Engineering at Saarland University & Saarland Informatics Campus, Germany. Prof. Apel received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2007 from the University of Magdeburg, Germany. His research interests include software product lines, software analysis, optimization, and evolution, as well as empirical methods and the human factor in software engineering. He is the author or co-author of over one hundred peer-reviewed scientific publications. He serves regularly in program committees of top-ranked international conferences, and he is a member of the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, IEEE Software, and Empirical Software Engineering. He was program-committee co-chair of the 31st International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE) and the 27th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE). His work has been funded by the esteemed Emmy-Noether and Heisenberg Programs of the German Research Foundation (DFG). In 2018, the Association for Computing Machinery appointed him as ACM Distinguished Member for "Outstanding Scientific Contributions to Computing". His work has received the Software Product Line Most Influential Paper Award, two Best Paper Awards, one ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, as well as awards by the Ernst-Denert Foundation, the Karin-Witte Foundation, and the State of Saxony-Anhalt.
Shan Lu is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on software reliability and efficiency, particularly detecting, diagnosing, and fixing functional and performance bugs in large software systems. Shan is an ACM Distinguished Member (2019 class), an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow (2014), a Distinguished Educator Alumnus from Department of Computer Science at University of Illinois (2013), and NSF Career Award recipient (2010). Her co-authored papers won Best Paper Awards at SOSP 2019, OSDI 2016 and FAST 2013, 3 ACM-SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards, a Google Scholar Classic Paper 2017, an ACM-SIGPLAN Research Highlight Award at PLDI 2011, and an IEEE Micro Top Picks in ASPLOS 2006.
