[Aspuru-Guzik group list] Fwd: TALK: High-Level Language Abstractions for Low-Level Programming (Cyrus Omar from CMU, Thursday March 31st, 2011, 8:35 PM, Harvard Hall 104)

---FWD--- Title: cl.oquence: High-Level Language Abstractions for Low-Level Programming Speaker:  Cyrus Omar (CMU) Date: 3-31-2011 Time: 8:35 PM Location: Harvard Hall 104 **Room change** Harvard CS264 2011 Guest Lecture Series "Massively Parallel Computing" Course (http://www.cs264.org) Host: Nicolas Pinto (Harvard, MIT) Abstract: When performance is important, developers turn to "low-level" languages like C, FORTRAN, CUDA and OpenCL. These languages handle issues related to register and stack allocation for their users, but do not otherwise attempt to manage memory allocation or control data movement. Developers continue to favor this design, despite the increased development burden, because small changes to an algorithm's data movement patterns can dramatically impact overall performance on modern hardware, including GPUs, but compilers for high-level languages are not yet able to reliably outperform motivated human experts. Indeed, the most prominent productivity-oriented languages in computational science -- MATLAB and Python -- come with significant performance overhead. In this talk, I will demonstrate that many of the productivity-enhancing features characteristic of high-level languages can be reconciled with a low-level programming model with no performance penalty, using techniques like type inference, structural polymorphism and compile-time metaprogramming. The resulting language, called cl.oquence, compiles directly into OpenCL source code. Because OpenCL is low-level, supports a variety of architectures and can be called from several languages, cl.oquence functions can be integrated into existing projects easily. For Python users, special bindings have been developed, based on pyopencl, that allow users to write cl.oquence functions inline and call them directly, without even the minimal syntactic overhead that a more generic binding would require. Although the language remains in beta, I have been using it to run large-scale neurobiological circuit simulations. An informal case study of this simulation framework will be presented. The language is free, open-source and well-documented. It will be available at http://cl.oquence.org/ shortly. Interested people can email me (cyrus(a)cmu.edu). Speaker biography: Cyrus Omar is a graduate student in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. His research focuses on building better programming languages, compilers, development environments and data sharing infrastructure for computational science and high-performance computing, with a particular focus on computational neurobiology. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~comar -- Nicolas Pinto, PhD http://web.mit.edu/pinto _______________________________________________ Seas-gpu-cdi mailing list Seas-gpu-cdi(a)seas.harvard.edu https://lists.seas.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/seas-gpu-cdi