Speaker: Ken Kennedy
John and Ann Doerr University Professor, Rice University Director, Center for High Performance Software

Monday, February 14, 2005
11:00 am - 12:00 pm
AP&M 4301

ABSTRACT

One way to increase national productivity is to broaden the community of programmers by making it possible for end users to develop applications for themselves. Indeed, many users today are producing highly functional applications using scripting languages and high-level problem-solving systems such as Matlab, Visual Basic, and S-PLUS. Unfortunately, the productivity gains are offset by the costs of rewriting these applications in "production" programming languages such as C or Fortran once they are determined to be useful. Eliminating the need for this rewriting step would bring about a dramatic increase in global programming productivity.

This talk will describe an emerging research theme, called telescoping languages, that is exploring ways to generate optimized high-level problem-solving languages from annotated domain libraries. The strategy involves an extensive, compute-intensive preliminary analysis of the library, performed at language-generation time. The output of this process, which could take many hours, or even days, to complete, will be an efficient compiler for an extended scripting language in which calls to the underlying domain library are recognized and optimized as primitive operations. The talk will describe this strategy and its application to a variety of problems including high level languages for signal processing, mathematical library generation, and Matlab parallelism.

The long-term goal of this research is to make it possible for ordinary users, particularly scientists and engineers, to build their own high-performance applications, just as they were once able to do in the early days of Fortran. If this effort succeeds, it should facilitate a dramatic broadening of the community that can use high-performance computing platforms for problem solving.

BIO
Ken Kennedy is the John and Ann Doerr University Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Center for High Performance Software Research (HiPerSoft) at Rice University. He has supervised thirty-six Ph.D. dissertations and published two books and over one hundred ninety technical articles on compilers and programming support software for high-performance computer systems. In recognition of his contributions to software for high performance computation, he received the 1995 W. Wallace McDowell Award, the highest research award of the IEEE Computer Society. In 1999, he was named the third recipient of the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award.