Tutorials -- Half Day/Wednesday PM

High-performance and scalability are hard to achieve in persistent and distributed object-oriented applications because of their inherent complexity. Developers are often unaware of the trade-offs and design choices that are critical to achieve the desired performance. In this tutorial, we discuss how to design and implement such applications for better performance. We describe performance issues faced by the developers and the design decisions that promote high performance. We present guidelines for evaluating the performance of architectural and design alternatives and describe tools and techniques used for such evaluations. Finally, we present three real-world case studies of performance evaluation of persistent and distributed OO applications.

Participants will learn about the major performance issues and design trade-offs in building persistent and distributed object-oriented applications. They will learn how to evaluate the performance of alternative system architectures, application designs, and infrastructure choices. They will also learn what tools and techniques to use for such evaluations.

Attendee background: This tutorial is targeted towards individuals who are engaged in or are considering building and deploying persistent or distributed object-oriented applications. We expect the attendees to understand the basics of object-oriented concepts, object-oriented languages, object-oriented database systems, and distributed object-oriented systems.

Ashutosh Tiwary is a researcher with the Research and Technology Group at Boeing and a Ph.D. Candidate in the Computer Science Department at the University of Washington. His thesis work is focused on performance evaluation and tuning of persistent and distributed OO systems. He was the chair of OOPSLA `95 and `96 Workshops on Building Large Persistent and Distributed Software Systems using Objects. He was also invited to speak at the OOPSLA `98 panel on Experiences in Building Distributed Systems.

Przemyslaw Pardyak is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Washington doing research on operating systems and performance evaluation. He received a M.S. degree in the area of distributed object-oriented systems and languages.