Performance Engineering Laboratory

Our mission is to educate elite programmers and to do high-quality research related to any aspect of programming, performance programming in particular.

History

In performance engineering (PE) the goal is to improve the running time and space efficiency of programs. Before I took the term performance engineering in use, it had been used by the compiler community. In the algorithmics community the subject matter is often called algorithm engineering, but I used the term performance engineering since the study objects are programs, not only algorithms.

The PE lab was built on the principle that all students who wrote their theses for me became automatically members of this research lab. In the work done at the PE lab, research orientation is clearly visible via the joint papers I have with many of my former undergraduate, graduate, and Ph.D. students.

At the end of 1998, I received a grant from the Danish Natural Science Council which I could use to create this research lab. In 2009, the PE lab got an official status as one of the research labs in the Algorithms and Programming Languages (APL) unit at the department. In 2018, the APL unit was discontinued and I became a member of the Software, Data, People & Society unit. At the beginning of 2019, after this administrative change, I decided to close the lab since the research done at the lab is so far away from People and Society.

Thank you for the fruitful 20 years! Even if the lab is closed, the work in algorithm engineering continues.

-Jyrki