SaC: Off-the-shelf Support for Data-Parallelism on Multicores

The advent of multicore processors has raised new demand for expressing and exploiting concurrency in the software mass market. This talk summarizes previous work on the data parallel, functional array processing language Single Assignment C (SaC for short). In its context we have developed sophisticated optimization techniques that transform high-level, generic array programs into highly efficient multi-threaded code executable on SMP architectures without any explicit concurrency annotations. The recent introduction of such machines in the mass market renders SaC a ready to use technology for data parallel applications. Its high-level of abstraction and its low-overhead C interface make it an excellent vehicle for exploiting data-parallelism by rewriting / embedding application kernels of existing legacy code in SaC. The talk focuses on the key compiler technologies that are crucial for the runtime achievements of SaC.

Speaker Details

Dr.rer.nat.habil. Sven-Bodo Scholz received his PhD in 1996 from the University of Kiel, Germany. From 1996 – 2004 he worked at the University of Kiel in a position similar to that of an Assistant Professor. In 2004 he received his Habilitation in Kiel. After that, he moved to the University of Hertfordshire where he is currently Senior Lecturer.His main research interest is in functional programming languages, high-level array programming, high-performance parallel computing and all theoretical advances and technologies that affect the interplay of these goals. This includes novel type systems, partial evaluation techniques, memory management techniques as well as approaches to generic programming.He has led several research projects focused around the design and implementation of functional programming systems all of which contributed to several ready-to-use systems in the public domain. He was a key contributor to the design and implementation of the functional array language SaC whose runtime performance competes with that of industrial Fortran compilers.His home page is at http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/~comqss/The SaC homepage is at http://www.sac-home.org/

Date:
Speakers:
Sven-Bodo Scholz
Affiliation:
University of Hertfordshire

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