Chair News

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We congratulate Asif Khan for having successfully defended his PhD on April 25th, 2022. Asif joined our team a bit less than five years ago in May 2017. Together with Fazal, Asif helped shape most of the work on emerging technologies at the CC Chair. He worked on several memory and in-memory architectures and developed pioneering compiler optimizations for systems with emerging memory technologies. His work has been published in several renown conferences and journals, including DAC, DATE, LCTES, CASES, ACM TECS, ACM TACO, IEEE TCAD and IEEE TC. Today he defended his thesis on "Design and code optimization for systems with next-generation racetrack memories” in a hybrid setup, with family and friends connecting remotely. Special thanks go to Prof. Yiran Chen from Duke University for acting as external reviewer. We are more than happy that Asif will stay with us as PostDoc for the near future!

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The CC Chair, together with Prof. Christian Pilato and Dr. Christoph Hagleitner, organised a workshop at the DATE Conference 2022 entitled "Data-driven applications for industrial and societal challenges: Problems, methods, and computing platforms" (DATA-DREAM'22). The workshop provided an international forum for researchers in the field of large-scale data analysis technologies to discuss challenges and ideas for the future of big data analytics. Participants shared their insights into current political, economic and technological developments, and placed special focus on their approaches to overcoming the hurdles towards wide adoption of reconfigurable computing platforms. This event is an initiative of the EVEREST project, which we hope will trigger collaborations and awareness in the community.

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TU Dresden has been one of the 21 partners of Software Campus since 2017. Here, master's and doctoral students of computer science receive further training and are prepared for leadership positions. In the process, participants in the program lead their own IT research project and manage the entire process independently. They receive support from experienced leaders. Each project is funded by the BMBF with up to 100,000 euros over a period of two years.

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The CC Chair was present this year at Embedded Systems Week, one of the top venues for hardware and software design. Robert Khasanov presented "Domain-specific Hybrid Mapping for Energy-efficient Baseband Processing in Wireless Networks", joint work with Julian, Christian, and Andres. This work proposes a hybrid design-time/runtime mapping methodology, which exploits the application domain knowledge and refines the scheduling algorithm (see video). Christian Menard and Clément Fournier, a diploma student at the CC Chair, presented their work on the coordination language Lingua Franca jointly with collaborators from UC Berkeley, UT Dallas, Hanyang University and Kiel University in the tutorial "Deterministic Reactive Programming for Cyber-Physical Systems Using Lingua Franca" (see video).

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The CC chair was present at this year's International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT), one of the top venues for compilers for parallel architectures. At PACT, Andres presented PolyGym: Polyhedral Optimizations as an Environment for Reinforcement Learning, a joint work with Alex that defines loop optimizations in the polyhedral framework as a problem that can be solved with machine learning methods. The work also highlights the challenges of the current heuristics and presents a search space that contains significantly better-performing loop variants. We are looking forward to improved polyhedral schedule heuristics in follow-up work!

 

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The FPGA for HPC workshop (HPCFPGA'21) targets FPGA technologies for High Performance Computing, and focuses on topics including hardware synthesis, high bandwidth memory, design optimization, and interconnected clusters of FPGA devices. At the workshop, Karl Friebel presented the paper "From Domain-Specific Languages to Memory-Optimized Accelerators for Fluid Dynamics". This marks the first joint publication of researchers from Politecnico di Milano, and in particular Prof. Christian Pilato's group, and our team in the context of the EU H2020 EVEREST Project. Karl described a prototype implementation of an end-to-end DSL-to-FPGA compilation flow for scientific computing.

 

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On July 9, Prof. Castrillon gave the closing keynote address at the Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing (PASC) Conference, co-sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS). PASC is a thriving conference that brings together researchers from the scientific computing, the computational science, and the computer science communities. Prof. Castrillon talked about how domain specific languages and compilers are badly needed to democratise high-performance computing, especially in the advent of emerging technologies and new computing non Von Neumann paradigms. The slides of the talk are available and a recording of the virtual keynote will be made available later in the year (here). 

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Hauke Mewes, a former Masters's thesis student at the chair for Compiler Construction, was awarded the N. J. Lehmann Price award 2021 for his work "Towards Optimizing Compilers for Systems with Racetrack Memories". The N.J.Lehmann award, named after the renowned TU Dresden alumni Nikolaus Joachim Lehmann (1921-1998), is awarded every two years to two outstanding theses at TU Dresden in the fields of Computer Science and Mathematics. The award particularly encourages research at the intersection of mathematics and real-world systems. Asif Ali Khan supervised Hauke's work at the chair, which turned into an excellent publication "Polyhedral Compilation for Racetrack Memories" at the peer-reviewed IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD). Hauke developed a prototype compiler to optimize and generate efficient codes for systems with racetrack memories. The award was handed over at this year's OUTPUT.DD science event, where Hauke also briefly talked about his work (see video). We are proud of Hauke's achievement and wish him all the best in his current and future endeavors.

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Andrés, who recently finished his PhD at the CC chair to then join the Barkhausen Institute, presented his work on “Embeddings of Task Mappings to Multicore Systems” at this year’s SAMOS Conference. What a pity that he couldn’t enjoy a trip to the beautiful island of Samos in Greece and profit from the the great atmosphere that characterises the conference. Andrés talked about an innovative way to think about the optimization space that arises when mapping applications to multicores. His approach makes it possible to transfer geometry-based optimization approaches to an otherwise complex and unstructured discrete space. 

 

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Alex Brauckmann, a member of the CC Chair from 2020, has been awarded the “Zeiss Diplompreis für Informatik” for his thesis “Investigating Input Representations and Representation Models of Source Code for Machine Learning”, supervised by Andres Goens. Alex’s thesis was the basis for a paper on “Compiler-Based Graph Representations for Deep Learning Models of Code” at the renown ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Compiler Construction (CC’20), featuring a novel deep learning method that improves predictive compiler heuristics. The Zeiss prize is awarded to outstanding thesis work at TU Dresden and the HTW Dresden in the areas of Scientific Computing, Machine Learning, Image Processing and Framework Design. Due to the pandemic, Alex couldn't receive the honour during this year's OUTPUT.DD science event, so we had to improvise a picture. We are happy for Alex and proud to have him in our team!