[Colloquium] DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER SERIES: Pat Hanrahan on December 3, 2010

[Katie Casey]

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Date: Friday, December 3, 2010 
Time: 2:30 p.m.
Place: Ryerson 251, 1100 E. 58th Street

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Speaker:		Pat Hanrahan

From:		Stanford University

Web page:	http://graphics.stanford.edu/~hanrahan

Title: 		Domain-specific languages for heterogeneous computer platforms

Abstract:  

Hardware is becoming increasingly specialized 
because of the need for power efficiency.
One way to gain efficiency is to use high-throughput processors (e.g. GPUs)
optimized for data-parallel applications;
these processors deliver more gigaflops per watt
than CPUs optimized for single-threaded programs.
Typical applications, however, 
consist of both sequential and parallel code segments.
For such applications, the optimal platform will use 
heterogenous combinations of different types of processing elements.
Nowadays in high-performance computing,
it is common to create hybrid systems 
consisting of multi-core CPUs and many-core GPUs 
combined into both shared memory multiprocessors 
and clusters connected by networks.

The challenge is that the computing model has also become more complicated.
A program for a cluster uses MPI,
a program for an SMP uses threads and locks,
and a program for a GPU uses a data-parallel programming model such as CUDA.
Programs written for one class of machine 
will not run efficiently on another class of machines.

Our thesis is that the only practical method for writing programs
for such heterogeneous machines is to raise the level of the
programming model. In particular, we advocate the use of domain-specific
languages (DSLs).  In this talk I will present the case for using DSLs,
our work designing and implementing Liszt (a DSL for solving PDEs on 
meshes), and our view of the programming environment needed to 
create DSLs and to map them to different platforms. This work is
being performed as part of the AHPCRC and Stanford Pervasive
Parallelism Laboratory.

Biography

Pat Hanrahan is the CANON Professor of Computer Science and Electrical
Engineering at Stanford University where he teaches computer graphics.
His current research involves visualization, image synthesis, virtual
worlds, and graphics systems and architectures.  Before joining Stanford
he was a faculty member at Princeton.

Pat has also worked at Pixar where he developed
developed volume rendering software and was the chief architect of the
RenderMan(TM) Interface - a protocol that allows modeling programs to
describe scenes to high quality rendering programs.
In addition to PIXAR, he has founded two companies, Tableau and PeakStream,
and served on the technical advisory boards of
NVIDIA, Exluna, Neoptica, VSee and Procedural.

Professor Hanrahan has
received three university teaching awards.
He has received two Academy Awards for Science and Technology,
the Spirit of America Creativity Award,
the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award,
the SIGGRAPH Stephen A. Coons Award,
and the IEEE Visualization Career Award.
He was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering
and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.