Trends and Concepts in the Software Industry I

The lecture will take place from Mo, July 12th – Th, July 15th, 2010 and will be held by Prof. Hasso Plattner. It takes place in auditorium 3 from 9:15 am until 4:45 pm.
Oral examinations take place on July 21st and July 26th in V-2.16. Concrete assignments to examination slots will be provided at the end of the lecture week.

Material from the Lecture

• Main Presentation, Dynamic Views
• Monday
  • Design and User Experience
  • Smartboard Lecture Notes
  • Whiteboard: OLTP, OLAP & ETL, Requirements for Modern ERP Systems
  • Modeling of Business Applications by Jens Freund (SAP)
• Tuesday
  • Trends in Hardware by Martin Grund
  • Data Structures for In-Memory Databases by Jens Krüger
  • Smartboard Lecture Notes
• Wednesday
  • Hardware-Aware Optimization: Using Intel Streaming SIMD Extensions by Thomas Willhalm (Intel)
  • Smartboard Lecture Notes
  • Processor Performance Counter Monitoring by Roman Dementiev (Intel)
• Thursday
  • Memory-Based Cloud Architectures by Jan Schaffner
  • Smartboard Lecture Notes

Contents

The focus of this lecture lies in and around enterprise applications:

• Design
  • Introduction to design thinking and how it can help in the software development process
  • Design research overview of activities at HPI and Center for Design Research at Stanford University
• Complexity and characteristics of enterprise applications
  • Focus on financial accounting
  • How accounting systems were built previously and how they can be built simpler today (e.g. reducing complexity by avoiding materialized aggregates)
• Column-oriented, in-memory databases and compression
• Trends in hardware
  • The shift from disk to main-memory
  • The CPU / memory boundary as the new bottleneck
• Parallel programming
  • Why is it hard to introduce parallelism to business applications?
  • Multi-core CPUs and how they change the way we must program
• Deployment options
  • On-premise vs. Software-as-a-Service
  • Massive parallelism by building a cluster of SMP machines (e.g. blade servers)
• Maintenance of software and interface compatibility

After the lecture the students should be able to see and discuss emerging trends of software engineering and data management in the context of business applications.

Grading

The grade will be determined in an oral examination (90%) and will include your individual involvement in discussions during the lecture (10%). The oral examination contains all topics discussed during the lecture including guest presentations and the literature provided previous to the lecture. The language of the exam, English or German, can be selected by the examinee. The oral examinations will take place on July 21st and July 26th. Each examination takes 45 minutes and 4 lecture participants are examined together. Concrete assignments to examination slots will be provided at the end of the lecture week.