Performance Engineering of Software Systems
MIT's 6.172 is a hands-on, project-based course on building fast, scalable software, taught in C. Lectures and materials cover performance analysis, algorithmic techniques for speed, instruction-level optimizations, caching and memory hierarchy tuning, parallel programming, and the tradeoffs involved in building systems that scale across cores and machines. The course uses programming projects where students profile and rewrite real code for measurable speedups, rather than abstract exercises. Provided through MIT OpenCourseWare, the materials include lecture videos, lecture notes, assignments, and project specifications, free to access with no certificate offered. It suits students who already know basic algorithms and C-level programming and want to understand why software is slow and how to systematically make it fast, from cache behavior up to multicore parallelism.