[Colloquium] CS Distinguished Lecture today at 3 pm in Ry. 251- James Larus (EPFL)

[Sandra Wallace]

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
DISTINGUISHED LECTURE SERIES

https://cs.uchicago.edu/page/distinguished-lecture-series <https://cs.uchicago.edu/page/distinguished-lecture-series>


James Larus 
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

Thursday, October 22, 2015, 3:00 pm 
Ryerson 251

Title: It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

Abstract:
The end of Dennard scaling and the imminent end of Moore¹s Law means that software systems and applications no longer benefit from a 40% per annum hardware performance increase. Software developers now must work harder to find the capability to support more productive, high-level programming languages; richer, more natural models of human-computer interactions; and new, compute-intensive applications. Future performance improvement will be more diverse and challenging than the previous silicon-paved path. Some include the performance engineering that previously was only necessary in cutting-edge systems, while others are more radical opportunities to change the way in which software and hardware is architected and built, including the on-going shift to massive-scale and reconfigurable computing. As the torch passes from hardware to software, the success of this transition is dependent on increasing and sustaining the rate of software
innovation, a process that is already emerging.

Bio:
James Larus is Professor and Dean of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne). Prior to joining IC in October 2013, Larus was a researcher, manager, and director in Microsoft Research for over 16 years and an assistant and associate professor in the Computer Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Larus has been an active contributor to numerous communities. He published over 100 papers (with 9 best and most influential paper awards), received 30 US patents, and served on numerous program committees and NSF, NRC, and DARPA panels. His book, Transactional Memory (Morgan Claypool) appeared in 2007. Larus received a National Science Foundation Young Investigator award in 1993 and became an ACM Fellow in 2006.

Larus joined Microsoft Research in 1998 to start and lead the Software Productivity Tools (SPT) group, which developed and applied a variety of innovative program analysis techniques to build tools to find software defects. This group’s ground-breaking research in program analysis and software defect detection is widely recognized by the research community, as well as being shipped in Microsoft products such as the Static Driver Verifier, FX/Cop, and other software development tools. Larus became a MSR Research Area Manager for programming languages and tools and started the Singularity research project, which demonstrated that modern programming languages and software engineering techniques can fundamentally improve software architectures. Subsequently, he helped start XCG, an effort in MSR to develop hardware and software support for cloud computing. In XCG, Larus started the development of the Orleans framework for cloud programming and the Catapult FPGA accelerator for the Bing search engine.

Before joining Microsoft, Larus was an Assistant and Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he published approximately 60 research papers and co-led the Wisconsin Wind Tunnel (WWT) research project with Professors Mark Hill and David Wood. WWT was a DARPA and NSF-funded project investigated new approaches to simulating, building, and programming parallel shared-memory computers. Larus’s research spanned a number of areas: including new and efficient techniques for measuring and recording executing programs’ behavior, tools for analyzing and manipulating compiled and linked programs, programming languages for parallel computing, tools for verifying program correctness, and techniques for compiler analysis and optimization.

Larus received his MS and PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989, and an AB in Applied Mathematics from Harvard in 1980. At Berkeley, Larus developed one of the first systems to analyze Lisp programs and determine how to best execute them on a parallel computer.



Hosts: Shan Lu and Haryadi Gunawi


*Reception to follow in Ry. 255 at 4:00 pm*
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