IBM Power System POWER7 Series, Optimization And Tuning Manual

Page: 11 / 224

© Copyright IBM Corp. 2012. All rights reserved.
ix
Preface
This IBM® Redbooks® publication provides advice and technical information about
optimizing and tuning application code to run on systems that are based on the IBM
POWER7® and ™ processors. This advice is drawn from application optimization
efforts across many different types of code that runs under the IBM AIX® and Linux operating
systems, focusing on the more pervasive performance opportunities that are identified, and
how to capitalize on them. The technical information was developed by a set of domain
experts at IBM.
The focus of this book is to gather the right technical information, and lay out simple guidance
for optimizing code performance on the IBM POWER7 and systems that run the
AIX or Linux operating systems. This book contains a large amount of straightforward
performance optimization that can be performed with minimal effort and without previous
experience or in-depth knowledge. This optimization work can:
򐂰
Improve the performance of the application that is being optimized for the
POWER7 system
򐂰 Carry over improvements to systems that are based on related processor chips
򐂰
Improve performance on other platforms
The audience of this book is those personnel who are responsible for performing migration
and implementation activities on IBM POWER7-based servers, which includes system
administrators, system architects, network administrators, information architects, and
database administrators (DBAs).
The team who wrote this book
This book was produced by a team of specialists from around the world working at the
International Technical Support Organization, Poughkeepsie Center.
Brian Hall is the lead analyst for Power performance improvement efforts with the IBM
Software Group Next Generation Systems team. He works with many IBM software
products to capitalize on the IBM Power Architecture® and develop performance preferred
practices for software development and deployment. After joining IBM in 1987, Brian
originally worked on the IBM XL C/C++/Fortran compilers and on the just-in-time compiler
for IBM Java on Power. He has a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Queen's
University at Kingston and a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University
of Toronto.
Mala Anand is a Senior Technical Staff Member with the System Performance team in the
IBM Systems and Technology Group. She holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science
from the University of Houston. Her areas of expertise include system performance and
architecture, with a focus on hypervisors, operating systems, networks, and middleware on
AIX and Linux. She has published papers on network, middleware, and
hypervisor performance.