Chair News

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The CC Chair was present at the 21st International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS), which was held online during the week of June 14 2021. ICCS is an A-ranked conference bringing together researchers and scientists from different disciplines to highlight the role of recent developments and challenges in computational science. Nesrine presented our work entitled “The OpenPME Problem Solving Environment for Numerical Simulations”. In this work, Nesrine introduces the OpenPME domain-specific language (DSL) for particle-mesh simulations that is built atop a domain metamodel general enough to cover the main types of numerical simulations: simulations using particles, meshes, and hybrid combinations of particles and meshes. This work is a collaboration with professor Ivo Sbalzarini and his group at the Chair of Scientific Computing for Systems Biology.

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Prof. Castrillon co-founded Silexica in 2014, as spin-off of his work at the ICE Institute at the RWTH Aachentogether with Weihua Sheng, Max Odendahl and his doctoral advisor Prof. Leupers. Silexica has been successfully producing bleeding edge C/C++ compilers and programming technology for heterogeneous computing systems since then, and secured over 28 million USD from international investors in the process. On June 10, 2021 Xilinx, a world leader in FPGA technology with around 5,000 employees, announced the acquisition of Silexica. We are particularly looking forward to see the result of the integration of Silexica’s SLX FPGA with Xilinx’ VitisTM. The CC Chair is proud of Maximilian Odendahl (Silexica’s CEO), Johannes Emigholz (Silexica’s COO)  and the rest of the team at Silexica for the amazing work over the past years!

 

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We congratulate Andrés Goens for having successfully defended his PhD on April 30th, 2021. Andrés was the first researcher to join the CC Chair, back then in October 2014 (one of the first entries in this news feed). Andrés has been an incredible support for the team, helping shape the research of those that came after him (see all his collaborative work in his publication list). Today he defended his thesis on “Improving Model-based Software Synthesis: A Focus on Mathematical Structures”, virtually as it is common for these times, with participation of family, friends and colleagues alongside a jury composed of five university professors. We thank Prof. Andy D. Pimentel from the University of Amsterdam for acting as external reviewer. We wish Andrés the best of luck as he moves on with his career!

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With great pleasure we welcome Galina Kozyreva to our team at the Chair for Compiler Construction. Galina obtained her diploma in Computer Science from the Saint Petersburg State University of Aerospace and Instrumentation in 2015 and has been working since then as software engineer in various roles. This included work on databases, security, reactive software, micro services and data mining. With us, Galina will be working in the area of domain-specific languages and compilers, with focus on MLIR progressive lowering and advanced optimizations for parallel and emerging computing systems. We look forward to collaborative work with Galina and are extremely happy to have her with us!

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We are glad to welcome Karl Friebel to our team at the Chair for Compiler Construction. Karl recently finished his Diplom in Computer Science at TU Dresden with Prof. Diana Göhriger on source-to-source compilation for FPGA-based systems. Karl will be working in the project “EVEREST: Design environment for extreme-scale big data analytics on heterogeneous platforms”, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement no 957269. Karl will be working on domain-specific languages and optimizing compilers for heterogeneous systems. Prior to joining our team, Karl spent most of his studies working on enabling new hardware designs for legacy applications via compiler tooling. While his main focus was on the hardware design and tooling, Karl gained considerable experience in end-user applications, mainly in the area of scientific computing and fluid dynamics in particular. We look forward to working with Karl and tackle the challenges of programming large heterogeneous systems!

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We welcomed the new year with an additional virtual event, the Hipeac conference, that took place between 18 and 20 of January 2021. Christian and Hasna, two Ph.D. students represented the Chair for compiler construction in two workshops: RAPDIO and PARMA-DITAM respectively. Christian presented his work entitled “Mocasin—Rapid Prototyping of Rapid Prototyping Tools: A Framework for Exploring New Approaches in Mapping Software to Heterogeneous Multi-cores” (Video Presentation). In this work, Christian introduces Mocasin, a new framework that combines know methods for mapping dataflow applications in unified toolbox and provides researchers with a flexible environment for quickly prototyping and evaluating new approaches. Hasna presented her paper entitled “Towards adaptive multi-Alternatives Process Network”. In her presentation, she introduced mAPN (multi-alternative process network), a novel approach for expressing algorithmic and parallelism adaptivtiy through dataflow graphs for larger design spaces.

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We welcome Felix Wittwer as new research assistant at the Chair for Compiler Construction.  Felix recently finished his master’s degree in Computer Science at TU Dresden. Already as a student, Felix became a regular at the CC Chair, where he finished his master thesis on language and compiler support for deterministic execution of parallel applications with shared state. Felix will be working in the project “EVEREST: Design environment for extreme-scale big data analytics on heterogeneous platforms”, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement no 957269. He will also be working with Christian Menard on parallel programming models for deterministic execution of automotive software. Prior to joining our team Felix studied in Dresden where he specialized in Compilers, Operating Systems and Systems Engineering. He is also an active contributor to open source software. We are lucky to have Felix as new member of the team and look forward to working with him in the next years!

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Like many other events in the recent past, the Embedded Systems Week took place virtually this year. Asif and Jeronimo represented the Chair for Compiler Construction where Asif also presented his work on "Polyhedral Compilation for Racetrack Memories" at the co-located International Conference on Compilers, Architecture, and Synthesis for Embedded Systems (CASES'20). In this paper, Asif presented a polyhedral compiler that generates efficient code for Racetrack Memories. This is joint work with Tobias Grosser and Torsten Hoefler from ETH Zurich, the place where Asif performed part of this work during his stay from Oct 2019 to Jan 2020. The visit was sponsored by a HiPEAC collaboration grant 2019.

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After a long time attending only virtual events, several members of the CC Chair attended the hybrid Forum on specification & Design Languages (FDL) in September 2020. Alex, Andres, Christian and Jeronimo participated in the conference, having contributed to two papers and organised a special session. Christian was a co-author of the paper “A Language for Deterministic Coordination Across Multiple Timelines” which was presented remotely by the lead author Marten Lohstroh from UC Berkley. The paper was nominated for best paper award, but was unfortunately not selected. Maybe next time. Alex presented a paper he co-authored with Andres that introduces ”ComPy-Learn: A Toolbox for Exploring Machine Learning Representations for Compilers”. This paper was one of four contributions to a special session on machine learning for programming languages and compilers.

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We were very happy to have Tobias Grosser as guest for the past two days (11.08.-12.08). Tobias is an associate professor in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh and a member of the Edinburgh Compiler and Architecture Design Group. At the CCC he had several (socially distant) exchanges with members of the groups exchanging ideas on optimizing compilers and intermediate representations. Tobias also gave a talk with several physical (and distant, cf. picture) and virtual attendees. He talked about a multi-level intermediate representation for hardware description languages, reporting on a recent PLDI publication.