Just a reminder of tomorrow's Distinguished Lecture in Computational
Science, to be given by Pat Hanrahan of Stanford University.
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Domain-Specific Languages for Heterogeneous Computer Platforms
March 24, 2010; 4:00pm
Room G-115, Maxwell Dworkin, 33 Oxford St., Cambridge
Pat Hanrahan, CANON Professor, Computer Science and Electrical
Engineering Departments, Stanford University
Abstract
Hardware is becoming increasingly specialized because of the need for
power efficiency. One way to gain efficiency is to use high-throughput
processors (e.g. graphics processing units) optimized for data-
parallel applications; these processors deliver more gigaflops per
watt than CPUs optimized for single-threaded programs. Typical
applications, however, consist of both sequential and parallel code
segments. For such applications, the optimal platform will use
heterogenous combinations of different types of processing elements.
Nowadays in high-performance computing, it is common to create hybrid
systems consisting of multi-core CPUs and many-core GPUs combined into
both shared memory multiprocessors and clusters connected by networks.
The challenge is that the computing model has also become more
complicated. A program for a cluster uses MPI, a program for a
symmetric multiprocessing architecture uses threads and locks, and a
program for a GPU uses a data-parallel programming model such as CUDA.
Programs written for one class of machine will not run efficiently on
another class of machines.
Our thesis is that the only practical method for writing programs for
such heterogeneous machines is to raise the level of the programming
model. In particular, we advocate the use of domain-specific languages
(DSLs). In this talk I will present the case for using DSLs, our work
designing and implementing Liszt (a DSL for solving partial
differential equations on meshes), and our view of the programming
environment needed to create DSLs and to map them to different
platforms. This work is funded by the Stanford DOE PSAAP Center and
the Pervasive Parallelism Laboratory.
About the Speaker
Pat Hanrahan is the CANON Professor of Computer Science and Electrical
Engineering at Stanford University, where he teaches computer
graphics. His current research involves visualization, image
synthesis, virtual worlds, and graphics systems and architectures.
Before joining Stanford, he was a faculty member at Princeton. He has
also worked at Pixar, where he developed volume rendering software and
was the chief architect of the RenderMan Interface--a protocol that
allows modeling programs to describe scenes to high-quality rendering
programs. Professor Hanrahan has received three university teaching
awards. He has received two Academy Awards for Science and Technology,
the Spirit of America Creativity Award, the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics
Achievement Award, the SIGGRAPH Stephen A. Coons Award and the IEEE
Visualization Career Award. He was recently elected to the National
Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Refreshments served at 3:45 pm
Mark your calendar for these upcoming talks:
Mar. 31, 4:00 pm: Ben Fry, design and software consultant (IIC
Colloquium)
Apr. 7, 4:00 pm: Bruce Boghosian, Tufts University (IIC Colloquium)
For more information about IIC colloquia and other events :
http://iic.harvard.edu/events/upcoming
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