[Colloquium] Shaw/MS Presentation/March 1, 2007

[Margaret Jaffey]

This is an announcement of Adam Shaw's MS Presentation.

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Date:  Thursday, March 1, 2007

Time:  9:00 a.m.

Place:  Ryerson 277

M.S. Candidate:  Adam Shaw

M.S. Paper Title:  Manticore: A heterogeneous parallel language

Abstract:
Parallel hardware is becoming widespread: new game consoles are
multicore vector machines, and an increasing number of desktop
computers are parallel machines as well. These machines support
parallelism at multiple granularities, from SIMD to multiple
processors. Likewise, it is common for applications to demand multiple
granularities of parallelism. For example, a GUI driving a parallel
computation engine would be conveniently expressed with threads to
manage user interaction and data parallelism at its computational
core. The Manticore programming language is designed to match the
various parallel abstractions of software with the heterogeneous
parallel elements of modern commodity hardware.

Manticore is a strict, type-safe, mostly pure functional programming
language built around a pared-down core of SML '97 that omits stateful
computations. Explicit nested data parallel constructs in the style of
NESL and its successors are layered on top of this substrate for
high-level parallel programs. We also include parallel concurrency
abstractions inspired by CML for more direct management of parallel
computations.

We address implementational issues, including how parallel constructs
are compiled with flattening and fusion transformations to realize
parallel performance benefits. We also formalize a sequential
semantics and consider some subtleties related to respecting it in a
parallel implementation. Specifically, we discuss detecting
communication and exception effects and compensating for exceptions at
runtime to preserve the sequential semantics.

Advisor:  Prof. John Reppy

A draft copy of Adam Shaw's MS Paper will be available soon in Ry 161A.


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Margaret P. Jaffey                             margaret at cs.uchicago.edu
Department of Computer Science
Student Support Rep (Ry 161A)        (773) 702-6011
The University of Chicago                  http://www.cs.uchicago.edu
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