Prof. Vikram Adve from UIUC will be “in the neighborhood” next week and giving a seminar about his recent work. Please join us! Wednesday March 21, 4pm CS Small Auditorium TITLE: HPVM: Simplifying Heterogeneous Parallel Programming Prof. Vikram Adve, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign ABSTRACT: Heterogeneous parallel systems are attractive because they use specialized computing elements, including GPUs, vector hardware, FPGAs, and domain-specific accelerators, that can greatly improve energy efficiency, performance, or both, compared with traditional homogeneous systems. A major drawback, however, is that programming and reasoning about heterogeneous parallel systems is highly challenging for application developers, language and compiler designers, and hardware engineers. In the HPVM project, we are developing a unified parallel program representation, Heterogeneous Parallel Virtual Machine, that aims to capture the wide range of parallelism available in such systems. We use the HPVM representation for three different purposes: (1) a compiler intermediate representation (IR), (2) a virtual ISA for shipping (virtual) object code, and (3) a representation for runtime scheduling. We have implemented the HPVM IR and associated compiler tools as an extension of the LLVM compiler infrastructure. In this talk, I will describe the HPVM representation, experimental results demonstrating the ability of HPVM to achieve performance comparable to separately hand-tuned code for GPUs and vector hardware, and to enable highly flexible scheduling policies. I will conclude with a brief discussion of how well-chosen system interfaces can enable highly programmable, specialized hardware, and the influence of such interfaces on key layers of the system stack. BIO: Vikram Adve is the Donald B. Gillies Professor and Interim Head of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and has affiliate appointments with the Coordinated Sciences Laboratory and the Information Trust Institute. Adve's research interests lie in developing and using compiler techniques to improve the performance, programmability and reliability of computer systems. Adve and his Ph.D. student, Chris Lattner, co-designed the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure, which enabled novel compilation capabilities for a wide range of languages. LLVM is widely used in industry today, ranging from mobile devices (e.g., in iOS and Android) to supercomputers (e.g., at Cray and NVIDIA) to data centers (e.g., at Google). Adve, Lattner and Evan Cheng received the ACM Software System Award in 2012 for co-developing LLVM (making UIUC the only University to win this Award twice: the Mosaic Web Browser won it in 1995). Adve has won a ten-year-retrospective Most Influential Paper award at CGO 2004, and distinguished paper awards at several conferences including PLDI 2005, SOSP 2007 and ICSE 2011. Adve's Ph.D. student, Robert Bocchino, won the 2010 ACM SIGPLAN Outstanding Dissertation Award and another Ph.D. student, John Criswell, won Honorable Mentions for both the 2014 ACM SIGOPS Dissertation Award and the 2014 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. Adve is a Fellow of the ACM and was named a University Scholar at the University of Illinois in 2015. Margaret Martonosi H. T. Adams '35 Professor of Computer Science. Director, Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education Princeton University ■ mrm@princeton.edu ■ http://www.princeton.edu/~mrm