Chair News

As has become a tradition, the CC chair participated in the REWE Team Challenge, a 5K run through downtown Dresden. This year, our chair was represented by three mixed teams: Com(e)-pile-run, consisting Clément Fournier, Conny Okuma, Julian Robledo Mejia, and Jerónimo Castrillón; Byte me if you can, featuring Christian Menard, João Paulo Cardoso de Lima, Nesrine Khouzami, and Robert Khasanov; and Caffeine Circuits, a joint CC-PD team with Maryam Eslami, Siddharth Gupta, Steffen Märcker, and Tassilo Tanneberger. This year, we started our team training sessions earlier than in the previous years. Thanks to these sessions, many of us significantly improved our personal records! We are already looking forward to the next year's competition!

Felix Suchert represented the CC Chair at the 32nd International Symposium for Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines, held from 5. to 8. May in Orlando, Florida. Together with Stephanie Soldavini from Politecnico di Milano, he presented their joint work on "Etna: MLIR-Based System-Level Design and Optimization for Transparent Application Execution on CPU-FPGA Nodes". It details a programming framework that allows a more easy and efficient integration of offloaded compute kernels into a dataflow-driven application. The work was presented both as poster and as a demo during demo night. Both presentations attracted lots of interested researchers and industry representatives and yielded productive and fruitful talks. Etna is part of a larger effort to ease the development of heterogeneous applications, which is driven by the EVEREST project. As such, it was also presented in this context in more detail during the EVEREST tutorial on day one of the conference, together with Prof. Christian Pilato from Politecnico di Milano. Felix also presented the efforts at CCC to expand the MLIR ecosystem as part of this tutorial session.

We welcome Anderson to the CCC team! Anderson is a professor at the Department of Informatics of the State University of Maringá - Paraná - Brazil. Prior to his faculty position, Anderson received his bachelors, masters and PhD degrees from from Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. His research background and interests are on parallel programming, programming languages, computer architecture, code generation and code optimization. Recently he has worked on leveraging machine learning for compiler analysis and optimization. It is in this area that Anderson will enrich the CCC team in the coming years. We look forward to joint research work with Anderson!

We would like to welcome Jiahong Bi to the CC Chair! Jiahong obtained his master’s degree on computer science from the TU Dresden in 2023 and his bachelor’s degree on engineering from eh Xidian University in China in 2019. Jiahong worked at the CC Chair as a student researcher, contributing for instance to the base2 MLIR dialect for custom representations, and in the context of his master thesis. In his thesis, entitled “A Lowering for High-Level Data Flows to Reconfigurable Hardware”, Jiahong worked on a novel dataflow MLIR dialect and a lowering path via high-level synthesis using the CIRCT project for FPGAs. He was supervised by Karl A. Friebel and Felix Suchert. With his expertise in high-level representations in compilers and tool-flows for heterogeneous systems, Jiahong will help our team in several projects that build around MLIR, most prominently on the MYRTUS EU Project. We are very happy to have Jiahong with us and are looking forward to working with him as PhD student.