[Colloquium] Talk by Leaf Petersen on Thursday, November 29, 2007

[Nita Yack]

********  TALK ANNOUNCEMENT **********
** Please send email to jhr at cs.uchicago.edu if you want to meet with  
the speaker or Neal Glew from Intel.

** Date: 29 November 2007, Thursday at 2:30 pm

** Place: Ryerson 251

** Speaker: Leaf Petersen (Intel)

** Talk Title: Ct and Pillar: Building a Foundation for Many-Core  
Programming.

** Abstract:
Seemingly fundamental limitations in hardware manufacturing are
driving an industry-wide move away from speedy but complex single core
processors towards simpler but massively parallel many-core
processors.  The job of discovering parallelism (and hence achieving
performance) on these new chips is left to software: that is, the
programmers and their tools.  Parallel programming has traditionally
been a specialty area requiring extensive expertise, and
non-deterministic concurrency introduces vast new classes of
exceptionally difficult to eliminate bugs.  In short, the job of
programming becomes much harder on many-core processors.  In order for
programmers to cope successfully with these challenges, the software
tools used to program many-core processors must take a giant leap
forward.  Specifically, programming abstractions and languages must be
designed to allow programmers to easily express parallelism in a way
that is scalable, performant, and most of all, correct.  This talk
discusses the problem in more detail, and describes two projects aimed
at supporting this goal. The Pillar implementation language is a
C-like high level compiler target language intended to provide the key
sequential and concurrent constructs needed to efficiently implement
task-parallel languages, while the Ct language is a system for
exploiting the key area of data-parallelism using ideas from
functional programming.  Together, these two systems provide a
foundation upon which a wide variety of abstractions and languages for
expressing parallelism can be built.


Nita

**************************
Nita Yack
Departmental Administrator
Computer Science Department
1100 E. 58th Street - Room 151
Chicago, IL 60637
(773) 702-6019
(773) 702-8487 FAX

"Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their  
sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don't turn up at all."


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.cs.uchicago.edu/pipermail/colloquium/attachments/20071120/d3654d33/attachment.html