Wednesday
Room 2
16:20 - 17:20
(UTC+02)
Talk (60 min)
Unlocking Performance Through Reverse Engineering
For decades, CPUs provided substantial performance boosts with each new generation. This enabled us to improve productivity by introducing additional abstraction layers, such as higher-level programming languages and containerization. Unfortunately, these advancements have also reduced our direct interaction with the CPU while fully utilizing the CPU's potential for performance-critical software requires a thorough understanding of its intricacies. However, some of these details are only partially documented or even not disclosed, but they can be reverse-engineered!
In this talk, we'll discard all abstraction layers to uncover the intricate details of our CPU, whether they are disclosed or not. Through hands-on reverse-engineering techniques focused on a specific x86 CPU, we aim to unlock significant performance enhancements for our code. While our focus is on an x86 architecture, these techniques are transferable to any type of CPU and architecture. After this talk, I hope you see reverse engineering as not only insightful but also downright fun!
Patrick Schittekat
Patrick Schittekat is Principal Engineer at Ascenium Inc where he focuses on the development of a LLVM backend for Aptos. The Ascenium Aptos is a novel, general-purpose processor architecture. It aims to eliminate the performance bottlenecks and high power consumption of the current CPU's extremely complex hardware implementation. Patrick has 20 years of experience both in the software industry as in research. He pursued and obtained his PhD in Mathematics, Optimization for Industrial Applications, while starting the Belgian subsidiary of ORTEC, a planning software supplier using Operation Research. After this, he was Professor in Operations Management at the Free University of Brussels before he moved to SINTEF, Norway. Before joining Ascenium Inc, Patrick was responsible at SINTEF for the development of Air Traffic Control software. The team has developed industry-leading decision support for Aviation and Air Traffic Control (ATC). Their work for ATC received an outstanding project award in SESAR, the largest EU modernization program for ATC systems.