It's a Wrap — Successful 14th Annual ICPE 2023 Marks Return of In-Person Event

By Petr Tuma, ICPE 2023 PC Co-Chair, and Marco Vieira, ICPE 2023 General Co-Chair

We are very pleased to report on the success of ICPE 2023 — the 14th annual ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering — which took place in Coimbra, Portugal, during April. The conference is an annual event where researchers and practitioners meet to present and discuss the latest results from both industry and academia related to software and systems performance.

This year's event marked an exciting return to an in-person conference, and nearly 150 attendees enjoyed three keynote speeches, 28 research presentations, seven data challenge presentations, a range of workshops and more. The presentations offered a broad range of topics, including AI, fair data sharing practices in research, and performance engineering practices at companies such as ABB, MongoDB and Redis.

There were far too many great moments to list them all, but we want to at least point to the three keynotes:

• Mathieu Nayrolles provided an overview of Ubisoft's performance engineering, offering a fascinating glimpse of the degree of observability Ubisoft has achieved into its games infrastructure.
• Georg Hager of FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg demonstrated the opportunities for low-level optimizations in HPC, which had the audience debating whether low-level digging was fun or something to be completely avoided.
• Federica Sarro of University College London offered a comparatively futuristic talk on the potential for automated optimization of "soft" properties, such as performance and quality of decision.

We were also especially excited by the data challenges, where the researchers demonstrated their results on a shared measurement dataset of interest.

It was gratifying to see that the conference attendees seemed to find the SPEC presentations especially compelling, including the paper outlining the challenges of efficiency benchmarking. We also presented the SPEC Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award to Dr. Lishan Yang — whose work was simply excellent, and her advice to young researchers even better — and recognized the best research contributions with the traditional ACM/SPEC ICPE Best Paper awards.

We hope you'll take a look at the entire conference proceedings, but if you have only limited time, be sure to check out the Best Paper Award candidates.

Looking ahead

The next ICPE is currently planned for April or May 2024, in London and will be co-chaired by Professor William Knottenbelt, Imperial College London, and Simonetta Balsamo, Ca' Foscari University Of Venice. We hope to see you there!

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