[Colloquium] Reminder: Armstrong/Dissertation Defense/May 11, 2015

[Margaret Jaffey]

This is a reminder about Tim's dissertation defense on Monday.

       Department of Computer Science/The University of Chicago

                     *** Dissertation Defense ***


Candidate:  Tim Armstrong

Date:  Monday, May 11, 2015

Time:  3:00 PM

Place:  Ryerson 255

Title: Implicitly Parallel Scripting as a Practical and Massively
Scalable Programming Model for High-Performance Computing

Abstract:
In recent years, large-scale computation has become an indispensable
tool in many fields. Programming models and languages play a central
enabling role by abstracting the computational capabilities of a
network of computers to enable programmers to construct applications
without dealing with the full complexity of a distributed system of
computers. This dissertation is motivated by the limitations of
current programming models for high-performance computing in
addressing emerging problems, including programmability for non-expert
parallel programmers, abstraction of heterogenous compute resources,
composition of heterogenous task types into unified applications, and
fault tolerance.

We demonstrate that a high-level programming language built on top of
a data-driven task parallelism execution model can feasibly address
many of these problems for many applications while remaining
expressive and efficient. We make several technical contributions
towards this goal: formal semantics for a deterministic execution
model based on lattice data types and task parallelism, a scalable
distributed runtime system implementing the execution model, and an
optimizing compiler for the Swift programming language that targets
this runtime system. We demonstrate that, in combination, these
contributions enable applications with common patterns of parallelism
to be simply and concisely expressed in Swift, yet run efficiently on
distributed-memory clusters with many thousands of compute cores.

Tim's advisor is Prof. Ian Foster

Login to the Computer Science Department website for details,
including a draft copy of the dissertation:

 https://www.cs.uchicago.edu/phd/phd_announcements#tga

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Margaret P. Jaffey            margaret at cs.uchicago.edu
Department of Computer Science
Student Support Rep (Ry 156)               (773) 702-6011
The University of Chicago      http://www.cs.uchicago.edu
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