IBM Research - Haifa

The System Optimization and Quality (SOQ) department focuses on developing technologies, tools, methods and services, for optimizing system performance and quality for the benefit of IBM system designers, partners and customers.

A strong area of expertise of our team is advanced methods for compiler optimization. Most recently, we engaged in several exploratory projects where we aim to deliver breakthrough performance through dynamic recompilation and optimization. Complimentary to our work in compiler optimization is the area of post-link optimization (i.e., FDPR), which optimizes executables to gain additional performance improvements. Our work in this area resulted in significant performance improvements to the object code of many important applications and systems, measured on benchmarks such as SPEC, TPC-C, and EEMBC. Our team has also developed advanced compiler optimization in the area of SIMD (auto-vectorization) and parallelism (auto-parallelism) and is considered a leader in this area, as reflected in the attached publication list.

In parallel to these activities, we focus on developing advanced performance tools for modern environments with a focus on multi-core architectures (i.e., Trace Analyzer). These tools provide enhanced analysis and visualization to help parallel application developers and performance teams efficiently identify and resolve bottlenecks. Moreover, with the emergence of cloud computing and virtualization as mainstream computing paradigms, our researchers extend our base set of tools with cloud-ready capabilities.

Over the years, the department has developed tools and methodologies to improve the testing and quality of software for IBM and its customers.

• Software bug detection following concurrent execution (Concurrent Testing)
• Efficient collaborative code reviews (CCRT)
• Code coverage and efficient test selection techniques (Focus)

The SOQ team also provides consulting and support to increase the effectiveness of software for customers who demand reliable enablement and high performance of complex concurrent applications running on IBM platforms. The team is already engaged in various activities for IBM and its customers in this area. With its innovative tools and methodologies, the team has improved the effectiveness of the IBM platforms and the software quality of these customers.

The SOQ department provides direct consultancy and services to external customers in the areas of software quality and performance on multicore architectures. Click here to learn more about the Performance and Quality Services (PQS) team.

• Performance Analysis and Optimization Technology
• Software Testing, Analysis and Reviews
• Software Performance and Quality Analysis