It's an exciting time for developments in computer performance, not just for the BPF technology (which I often write about) but also for processors with 3D stacking and cloud vendor CPUs (e.g., AWS Graviton2); for memory with the arrival of DDR5 and High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) on-processor; for storage including new uses for 3D Xpoint as a 3D NAND accelerator; for networking with the rise of QUIC and eXpress Data Path (XDP); and so on. I summarized these topics and more as a plenary conference talk, including my own predictions (as a senior performance engineer) for the future of computing performance, with a focus on back-end servers.

The video is on youtube:

The slides are on slideshare or as a PDF:

I work on many areas of performance, but recently I've had a lot of demand to talk about BPF. This was a chance to talk about other things I've been working on, such as the present and future of hardware performance. I also wrote about these topics in detail for my recent Systems Performance 2nd Edition book.

Note that my predictions in this talk may be wrong, but they should be thought provoking. I hope you enjoy it!

References

I've reproduced the talk references below, so you can click on links:

• [Gregg 08] Brendan Gregg, “ZFS L2ARC,” http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2008-07-22/zfs-l2arc.html, Jul 2008
• [Gregg 10] Brendan Gregg, “Visualizations for Performance Analysis (and More),” https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa10/visualizations-performance-analysis-and-more, 2010
• [Greenberg 11] Marc Greenberg, “DDR4: Double the speed, double the latency? Make sure your system can handle next-generation DRAM,” https://www.chipestimate.com/DDR4-Double-the-speed-double-the-latencyMake-sure-your-system-can-handle-next-generation-DRAM/Cadence/Technical-Article/2011/11/22, Nov 2011
• [Hruska 12] Joel Hruska, “The future of CPU scaling: Exploring options on the cutting edge,” https://www.extremetech.com/computing/184946-14nm-7nm-5nm-how-low-can-cmos-go-it-depends-if-you-ask-the-engineers-or-the-economists, Feb 2012
• [Gregg 13] Brendan Gregg, “Blazing Performance with Flame Graphs,” https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa13/technical-sessions/plenary/gregg, 2013
• [Shimpi 13] Anand Lal Shimpi, “Seagate to Ship 5TB HDD in 2014 using Shingled Magnetic Recording,” https://www.anandtech.com/show/7290/seagate-to-ship-5tb-hdd-in-2014-using-shingled-magnetic-recording, Sep 2013
• [Borkmann 14] Daniel Borkmann, “net: tcp: add DCTCP congestion control algorithm,” https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=e3118e8359bb7c59555aca60c725106e6d78c5ce, 2014
• [Macri 15] Joe Macri, “Introducing HBM,” https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/hbm, Jul 2015
• [Cardwell 16] Neal Cardwell, et al., “BBR: Congestion-Based Congestion Control,” https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3022184, 2016
• [Gregg 16] Brendan Gregg, “Unikernel Profiling: Flame Graphs from dom0,” http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2016-01-27/unikernel-profiling-from-dom0.html, Jan 2016
• [Gregg 16b] Brendan Gregg, “Linux 4.X Tracing Tools: Using BPF Superpowers,” https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa16/conference-program/presentation/linux-4x-tracing-tools-using-bpf-superpowers, 2016
• [Alcorn 17] Paul Alcorn, “Seagate To Double HDD Speed With Multi-Actuator Technology,” https://www.tomshardware.com/news/hdd-multi-actuator-heads-seagate,36132.html, 2017
• [Alcorn 17b] Paul Alcorn, “Hot Chips 2017: Intel Deep Dives Into EMIB,” https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-emib-interconnect-fpga-chiplet,35316.html#xenforo-comments-3112212, 2017
• [Corbet 17] Jonathan Corbet, “Two new block I/O schedulers for 4.12,” https://lwn.net/Articles/720675, Apr 2017
• [Gregg 17] Brendan Gregg, “AWS EC2 Virtualization 2017: Introducing Nitro,” http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-11-29/aws-ec2-virtualization-2017.html, Nov 2017
• [Russinovich 17] Mark Russinovich, “Inside the Microsoft FPGA-based configurable cloud,” https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/inside-microsoft-fpga-based-configurable-cloud, 2017
• [Gregg 18] Brendan Gregg, “Linux Performance 2018,” http://www.brendangregg.com/Slides/Percona2018_Linux_Performance.pdf, 2018
• [Hady 18] Frank Hady, “Achieve Consistent Low Latency for Your Storage-Intensive Workloads,” https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/optane-technology/low-latency-for-storage-intensive-workloads-article-brief.html, 2018
• [Joshi 18] Amit Joshi, et al., “Titus, the Netflix container management platform, is now open source,” https://netflixtechblog.com/titus-the-netflix-container-management-platform-is-now-open-source-f868c9fb5436, Apr 2018
• [Cutress 19] Dr. Ian Cutress, “Xilinx Announces World Largest FPGA: Virtex Ultrascale+ VU19P with 9m Cells,” https://www.anandtech.com/show/14798/xilinx-announces-world-largest-fpga-virtex-ultrascale-vu19p-with-9m-cells, Aug 2019
• [Gallatin 19] Drew Gallatin, “Kernel TLS and hardware TLS offload in FreeBSD 13,” https://people.freebsd.org/~gallatin/talks/euro2019-ktls.pdf, 2019
• [Redestad 19] Claes Redestad, Staffan Friberg, Aleksey Shipilev, “JEP 230: Microbenchmark Suite,” http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/230, updated 2019
• [Bearman 20] Ian Bearman, “Exploring Profile Guided Optimization of the Linux Kernel,” https://linuxplumbersconf.org/event/7/contributions/771, 2020
• [Burnes 20] Andrew Burnes, “GeForce RTX 30 Series Graphics Cards: The Ultimate Play,” https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/introducing-rtx-30-series-graphics-cards, Sep 2020
• [Charlene 20] Charlene, “800G Is Coming: Set Pace to More Higher Speed Applications,” https://community.fs.com/blog/800-gigabit-ethernet-and-optics.html, May 2020
• [Cutress 20] Dr. Ian Cutress, “Insights into DDR5 Sub-timings and Latencies,” https://www.anandtech.com/show/16143/insights-into-ddr5-subtimings-and-latencies, Oct 2020
• [Ford 20] A. Ford, et al., “TCP Extensions for Multipath Operation with Multiple Addresses,” https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8684, Mar 2020
• [Gregg 20] Brendan Gregg, “Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud, Second Edition,” Addison-Wesley, 2020
• [Hruska 20] Joel Hruska, “Intel Demos PCIe 5.0 on Upcoming Sapphire Rapids CPUs,” https://www.extremetech.com/computing/316257-intel-demos-pcie-5-0-on-upcoming-sapphire-rapids-cpus, Oct 2020
• [Liu 20] Linda Liu, “Samsung QVO vs EVO vs PRO: What’s the Difference? [Clone Disk],” https://www.partitionwizard.com/clone-disk/samsung-qvo-vs-evo.html, 2020
• [Moore 20] Samuel K. Moore, “A Better Way to Measure Progress in Semiconductors,” https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/a-better-way-to-measure-progress-in-semiconductors, Jul 2020
• [Peterson 20] Zachariah Peterson, “DDR5 vs. DDR6: Here's What to Expect in RAM Modules,” https://resources.altium.com/p/ddr5-vs-ddr6-heres-what-expect-ram-modules, Nov 2020
• [Salter 20] Jim Salter, “Western Digital releases new 18TB, 20TB EAMR drives,” https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/07/western-digital-releases-new-18tb-20tb-eamr-drives, Jul 2020
• [Spier 20] Martin Spier, Brendan Gregg, et al., “FlameScope,” https://github.com/Netflix/flamescope, 2020
• [Tolvanen 20] Sami Tolvanen, Bill Wendling, and Nick Desaulniers, “LTO, PGO, and AutoFDO in the Kernel,” Linux Plumber’s Conference, https://linuxplumbersconf.org/event/7/contributions/798, 2020
• [Vega 20] Juan Camilo Vega, Marco Antonio Merlini, Paul Chow, “FFShark: A 100G FPGA Implementation of BPF Filtering for Wireshark,” IEEE 28th Annual International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM), 2020
• [Warren 20] Tom Warren, “Microsoft reportedly designing its own ARM-based chips for servers and Surface PCs,” https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/18/22189450/microsoft-arm-processors-chips-servers-surface-report, Dec 2020
• [Google 21] Google, “Cloud TPU,” https://cloud.google.com/tpu, 2021
• [Haken 21] Michael Haken, et al., “Delta Lake 1S Server Design Specification 1v05, https://www.opencompute.org/documents/delta-lake-1s-server-design-specification-1v05-pdf, 2021
• [Intel 21] Intel corporation, “Intel® OptaneTM Technology,” https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/storage/optane-technology-brief.html, 2021
• [Quach 21a] Katyanna Quach, “Global chip shortage probably won't let up until 2023, warns TSMC: CEO 'still expects capacity to tighten more',” https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/16/tsmc_chip_forecast, Apr 2021
• [Quach 21b] Katyanna Quach, “IBM says it's built the world's first 2nm semiconductor chips,” https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/06/ibm_2nm_semiconductor_chips, May 2021
• [Ridley 21] Jacob Ridley, “IBM agrees with Intel and TSMC: this chip shortage isn't going to end anytime soon,” https://www.pcgamer.com/ibm-agrees-with-intel-and-tsmc-this-chip-shortage-isnt-going-to-end-anytime-soon, May 2021
• [Shilov 21] Anton Shilov, “Samsung Develops 512GB DDR5 Module with HKMG DDR5 Chips,” https://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-512gb-ddr5-memory-module, Mar 2021
• [Shilov 21b] Anton Shilov, “Seagate Ships 20TB HAMR HDDs Commercially, Increases Shipments of Mach.2 Drives,” https://www.tomshardware.com/news/seagate-ships-hamr-hdds-increases-dual-actuator-shipments, 2021
• [Shilov 21c] Anton Shilov, “SK Hynix Envisions 600-Layer 3D NAND & EUV-Based DRAM,” https://www.tomshardware.com/news/sk-hynix-600-layer-3d-nand-euv-dram, Mar 2021
• [Shilov 21d] Anton Shilov, “Sapphire Rapids Uncovered: 56 Cores, 64GB HBM2E, Multi-Chip Design,” https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-sapphire-rapids-xeon-scalable-specifications-and-features, Apr 2021
• [SuperMicro 21] SuperMicro, “B12SPE-CPU-25G (For SuperServer Only),” https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/B12SPE-CPU-25G, 2021
• [Thaler 21] Dave Thaler, Poorna Gaddehosur, “Making eBPF work on Windows,” https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2021/05/10/making-ebpf-work-on-windows, May 2021
• [TornadoVM 21] TornadoVM, “TornadoVM Run your software faster and simpler!” https://www.tornadovm.org, 2021
• [Trader 21] Tiffany Trader, “Cerebras Second-Gen 7nm Wafer Scale Engine Doubles AI Performance Over First-Gen Chip,” https://www.enterpriseai.news/2021/04/21/latest-cerebras-second-gen-7nm-wafer-scale-engine-doubles-ai-performance-over-first-gen-chip, Apr 2021
• [Vahdat 21] Amin Vahdat, “The past, present and future of custom compute at Google,” https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/systems/the-past-present-and-future-of-custom-compute-at-google, Mar 2021
• [Wikipedia 21] “Semiconductor device fabrication,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_device_fabrication, 2021
• [Wikipedia 21b] “Silicon,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon, 2021
• [ZonedStorage 21] Zoned Storage, “Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) SSDs,” https://zonedstorage.io/introduction/zns, 2021

I've taken care to cite the author names along with the talk title and date, including for Internet sources, instead of the common practice of just listing URLs. I followed that practice when writing some earlier books, and it has since struck me as unfair that some references had author names and some didn't. Nowadays I always include names when known.

In case you are interested, at the same conference I also gave a talk on BPF Internals.