Domain specialization is expected to play a big role in how computer systems evolve in future. With the end of Moore’s law, we are already seeing CPU, GPU and domain specific hardware evolving rapidly. The next decade is therefore expected to see big changes in how we develop, compile and run software. This project focuses on data systems, a class of systems where, as the data sizes grow, performance scaling is going to be of importance.
First, we believe that domain-specific compilers will play a crucial strategic role in helping software leverage the changing hardware landscape. Such compilers will be multi-layered and will progressively lower computation through multiple intermediate abstractions, performing domain specific optimizations at the higher layers and specializing code to the hardware in lower layers. We have been working on two such domain specific compilers in the data domain. Second, new hardware specific algorithms need to be designed to harness the hardware’s capabilities. To this end, we are designing new algorithms that can effectively harness the raw capabilities of a GPU irrespective of its architecture.
