Jason Hearne-McGuiness : Knuth, Amdahl: I spurn thee!

Photo ID will be required to gain entrance to Bloomberg's Park House site.

Arrive from 18:00 for 19:00 start.

Jason Hearne-McGuiness

will be presenting

Knuth, Amdahl: I spurn thee!A furtive fumble in Hard-Core Obscenity: the misuse of Template Meta-Programming to implement micro-optimisations in HFT.

High-Frequency Trading (HFT) and low-latency trading are becoming one of the few preserves of C++ in which Dionysian use of micro-optimisations is not only deemed acceptable, but positively demanded! This shameful secret has been covered up by the more prurient and sensible. In this talk a revealing glimpse of the juicy techniques and perve^H^H^H^Hractices will be given. For example performance anomalies lead to a discovery of quirks in generated assembler due to different compiler versions. Exactly what is static branch-prediction, and how is it (ab)used? Why is counting the number of set bits of the remotest interest? And the "curious case of the switch-statement" will be uncovered.

There might be some food and drink provided.

After the talk we will probably relocate to a suitable hostelry for drinks and chat.

Note that the need to show photo ID implies we will require people's names matching their ID.