via Danny Ayers, Raw Blog The Law Enforcement and Forensic Examiner Introduction to Linux: A Beginner's Guide [PDF] by Special Agent Barry J. Grundy:

"This (sic) purpose of this document is to provide an introduction to the GNU/Linux (Linux) operating system as a forensic tool for computer crime investigators. There are better books written on the subject of Linux (by better qualified professionals), but my hope here is to provide a single document that allows a user to sit at the shell prompt (command prompt) for the first time and not be overwhelmed by a 700-page book."...

I've been proved wrong. The Vets came second in the BBC - Test The Nation quiz.. The Celebrity team won.

Team Smeed scored 50/70 (71.42%) - above the national average and just shy of the top 20% ;-)

The family are watching the BBC - Test The Nation programme just now. Two of Heather's flat-mates - Giles and Matt - are in the Vets team. No doubt the Vets team will be the most academically qualified but since the topic for tonight's quiz is "Entertainment' I confidently predict that the Vets will fare abysmally! ;-)

"As VLSI technology improvements continue to widen the gap between processor and main memory cycle times, cache performance becomes increasingly important to overall system performance. Cache memories help alleviate the cycle time disparity, but only for programs that exhibit sufficient spatial and temporal locality. Programs with unruly access patterns spend much of their time transferring data to and from the cache. To fully exploit the performance potential of fast processors, programmers must explicitly consider cache behavior, restructuring their codes to increase locality. As these fast processors proliferate, techniques for improving cache performance must move beyond the supercomputer and multiprocessor communities and into the mainstream of computing.

In this paper, we examine some of the techniques that programmers can use to improve cache performance. We show how to use CProf, a cache profiler, to identify cache performance bottlenecks and gain insight into their origin. This insight helps programmers understand which of the well-known program transformations are likely to improve cache performance. Using CProf and a "cookbook" of simple transformations, we show how to tune the cache performance of six of the SPEC92 benchmarks. By restructuring the source code, we greatly improve cache behavior and achieve execution time speedups ranging from 1.02 to 3.46."

Optimization of Computer Programs in C

"This document describes techniques for optimizing (improving the speed of) computer programs written in C. It focuses on minimizing time spent by the CPU and gives sample source code transformations that often yield improvements. Memory and I/O speed improvements are also discussed."

My students are reporting some interesting results from my couple of C quick hacks to tax cache that:

"exposes more extreme pathological negative performance characteristics because of poor memory access patterns

They may be hacks but they are well-documented ;-). They also underline the current lecture material for my computer architecure and design class.