View the week-by-week plan of the course, including
exercise definitions.
Go to the course
forum (use this to ask technical questions about exercises, so everyone can
benefit from the questions and answers).
Textbooks:
The course does not follow any specific textbook, but here are a few
recommended ones I use:
- Jean-Yves Le Boudec, Performance Evaluation of
Computer and Communication Systems, EPFL Press 2010
A very practical exposition of the fundamentals.
Free download from the author's site
- Raj Jain, The Art of Computer Systems Performance
Analysis, Wiley 1991
Covers nearly all the material of the course, at adequate depth or more.
And also quite a few things we will not cover.
- Avrill M. Law and W. David Kelton, Simulation,
Modeling, and Analysis, McGraw Hill, 3rd ed., 2000
Provides a very good treatment of workload modeling by
fitting distributions, and of analyzing the results of simulations.
They also discuss aspects of simulation that we will not treat
so deeply, such as the creation of good models.
- Mor Harchol-Balter, Performance Modeling and Design of
Computer Systems, Cambridge University Press, 2013.
The subtitle is "Queueing Theory in Action" and says it all.
- Neil J. Gunther, The practical Performance
Analyst, Authors Choice Press, 2000.
Mainly about analysis, using methods from queueing theory to physics.
Grading:
The grade in the course will be determined by your work.
There will be 11 weekly exercises, worth 8 points each, and a quiz
worth 12 points.
There will be no final exam.
Exercises must be submitted on time, as they will be discussed in class the
week after they are given.
If you have a good reason for not doing one or more of the exercises
(e.g. you have milu'im for 5 days or more in that week) you will be excused,
and the grade will be calculated based on the others.
The default grade for a “very good” exercise is 95.
A grade of 100 is reserved for whoever does something special extra,
or shows some special insights.
Note that "extra" does not just mean "more" — rather, it has to be
MEANINGFUL AND INTERESTING.
Links:
For more information on various topics, see the
collection of performance evaluation links.
To HUJI CS home page