A retrospective on my work as a performance engineer at Sun Microsystems — two Supercomputing 2002 papers I gathered data for, the NUMA-and-MPI hardware landscape of the era, the UltraSPARC processors measured against the 6502 of my childhood and the CPUs of today, why the CISC-versus-RISC mental model is long past its expiration date, Tanenbaum’s register-less stack machine, and how a memcpy change shipped in Solaris.
