Chair News

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From February 5 to 10, 2017 the Dagstuhl seminar 17061 „Wildly Heterogeneous Post-CMOS Technologies Meet Software“ took place, organized by Jeronimo Castrillon (TU Dresden, leader of the Orchestration path), Tei-Wei Kuo (National Taiwan University), Heike E. Riel (IBM Research Zurich), and Sayeef Salahuddin (University of California, Berkeley). The 30 participants, among them 5 from cfaed, enjoyed one week of interesting talks and intensive, interdisciplinary discussions about the challenges and opportunities of advancing computing beyond current CMOS technology. The participants covered the whole spectrum from post-CMOS materials research up to software development for future heterogeneous computing systems. Soon, a report about the seminar will be compiled and made available at the seminar website. During the seminar, Prof. Castrillon gave an overview of the research topics in the Orchestration Path of cfaed. Apart from the technical program, the seminar had ample space for discussions and social activities (e.g., a tour in the city of Trier).  

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The International Symposiom on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO) is a premier event in compiler construction. This year's CGO took place in Austin, Texas, in the USA, between the 4-8 of February and was co-located with PPoPP and HPCA, two other major conferences. The joint venue hosted a plethora of workshops and tutorials that brought together experts on compiler technologies and programming languages. During the conference, Andrés Goens presented a poster with the title "Optimizing for Data-Parallelism in Kahn Process Networks" as part of the ACM Student Research Competition.

 

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The Chair for Compiler Construction was well represented at this year’s HiPEAC Conference, which took place in Stockholm, Sweden from the 23th-25th of January. The HiPEAC conference is the premier European forum for experts in computer architecture, programming models, compilers and operating systems for embedded and general-purpose systems. Prof. Castrillon gave a talk on flexible and scalable dataflow programming for manycores in a tutorial entitled “Heterogeneous multicore design automation: current and future”. He also talked about general mapping problems for manycores during the MULTIPROG’17 Workshop and participated in a panel discussion to close the event. 

 

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Christian Menard received the Hermann-Willkomm prize for his Diploma Thesis entitled “Mapping KPN-based Applications to the NoC-based Tomahawk Architecture”. The prize is awarded to the best thesis in the area of Information Systems Engineering (Informationssystemtechnik). Christian’s work was supervised by Andrés Goens, a researcher of the Chair for Compiler Construction. The techniques described in the thesis are part of a compiler developed in the context of the Orchestration Path of the Excellence Cluster cfaed. The compiler targets the Tomahawk architecture developed at the Vodafone Chair, headed by Prof. Gerhard Fettweis.

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From 6-7 October, Daniele Spampinato, who is a Ph.D. candidate at ETH Zürich, visited the Chair for Compiler Construction. Daniele's research focuses on representations of mathematical expert knowledge for high-performance synthesis. In his work he has produced the LGen compiler for performance-optimized linear algebra computations. At ETH Zürich, Daniele is supervised by Markus Püschel, who is known for his work on SPIRAL. On 6 October, Daniele gave a talk on his work on LGen at the Andreas-Pfitzmann-Building. Apart from this formal presentation, Daniele's visit led to numerous useful informal discussions at the CC Chair.

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We would like to welcome Lars Schütze to the Chair for Compiler Construction. Lars has a bachelor and master degrees in computer science from the TU Dresden and had worked as researcher at the Software Technology Group headed by Prof. Uwe Aßmann. Lars will work on his PhD in the context of the RoSi project, which studies role-based software infrastructures for continuos-context-sensitive systems. We are very happy to research with Lars in which ways role-based programming can be made more efficient with compiler techniques. 

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The chair for compiler construction contributed with a talk and a demonstration to the IEEE 5G Summit Dresden, held at the International Congress Center Dresden on the 29th of September. Prof. Castrillon gave a talk on “Compiling for Deeply Embedded and Heterogeneous Signal Processing Systems” where he discussed automatic code generation for heterogeneous platforms like the Tomahawk chip. This was demonstrated by Robert Khasanov in a joint booth with the Vodafone Chair for Mobile Communications.

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Andres Goens at MCSoC'16

The chair for compiler construction was represented by Prof. Jerónimo Castrillón and Andrés Goens during a special session on “Programming models and methods for heterogeneous parallel embedded systems” at the 10th IEEE International Symposium on Embedded Multicore/Many-core Systems-on-Chip (MCSoC-16) in Lyon, France.

The session, chaired by Prof. Castrillón, also included talks from Prof. Haubelt from the University of Rostock (DE) and Prof. Mattavelli from the EPFL (CH). Andrés Goens presented the work: “Why Comparing System-level MPSoC Mapping Approaches is Difficult: a Case Study”, which compares, for the first time, two large frameworks for mapping Kahn Process Network applications to heterogeneous MPSoCs. A work of the CC chair in collaboration with Prof. Pimentel from the University of Amsterdam and partly supported by a HiPEAC Collaboration Grant. The session was well visited, with over 50 attendees.

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Dr. Michel Steuwer from the University of Edinburgh (UK) is going to visit our group from Aug. 24th to Aug. 26th. Michel is an expert in parallel programming with algorithmic skeletons on heterogeneous machines. He is the main developer of SkelCL, a C++ library for parallel skeletal programming on heterogeneous systems. SkelCL provides high-level abstractions (e.g, such as map and reduce operations known from functional programming) to ease the development of parallel OpenCL code for multi cores and GPUs. On Aug. 25th, 10:00 - 11:30, Room 1004 of the Andreas-Pfitzmann-Bau, Michel will give a talk on SkelCL and his current research on rewrite-based generation of OpenCL code. Please feel cordially invited to this lecture.

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Prof. Castrillon gave an intensive course on “Parallel Programming with Models of Computation” during the week of May 16th, 2016 at the Universidad de Antioquia in Medellín, Colombia. The course discussed fundamentals of parallelism, parallelizing compilers and compilation for so-called parallel dataflow programming models. It was attended by students and researchers at all levels, including professors, PhD students as well as students of the masters and bachelor programs of electronic engineering and computer science, both from the Universidad de Antioquia and the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana. 

For this course, Prof. Castrillon was invited by Prof. Sebastian Isaza, an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electronic Engineering, University of Antioquia, where he is also part of the SISTEMIC research group. The course was financed by Colciencias, an agency that fosters science, technology and innovation in Colombia. We would like to thank Colciencias, Prof. S. Isaza and the course attendees for this interesting week in Medellín.