[talks] Prof. Vikram Adve, U Illinois. March 21. 4pm. CS Small Auditorium.

[Margaret Martonosi]

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 at princeton.edu ■ http://www.princeton.edu/~mrm