Porting and optimising star: a case study of suffering and surfacing

This paper has three main parts. The first part is a description of our project STAR. It explains what our program does and what makes it special compared to other similar programs. The second part pertains to the porting of our program to other platforms. It enumerates the errors of our ways, how we struggled to overcome them and what we learned in the process. The last part narrates our strategy to optimise the program. We will explain why we deviated from the general accepted strategy to optimise those parts with the highest potential gain.