Kunle Olukotun is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University. He is well known for leading the Stanford Hydra research project which developed one of the first chip multiprocessors with support for thread-level speculation (TLS). Olukotun founded Afara Websystems to develop high-throughput, low power server systems with chip multiprocessor technology. Afara was acquired by Sun Microsystems; the Afara microprocessor technology, called Niagara, is at the center of Sun's throughput computing initiative.

Abstract

Today, all high-performance computer architectures are parallel and heterogeneous; a combination of multiple CPUs, GPUs and specialized processors. This creates a complex programming problem for application developers. Domain-specific languages (DSLs) are a promising solution to this problem because they provide an avenue for high-level application-specific abstractions to be mapped directly to low level architecture-specific programming models providing both high programmer productivity and high execution performance.

In this talk I will describe our approach to building high performance DSLs, which is based on embedding in Scala, light-weight modular staging and a DSL infrastructure called Delite. I will describe how we transform DSL programs into efficient first-order low-level code using domain specific optimization, parallelism optimization, locality optimization, scalar optimization, and architecture-specific code generation. I will also briefly explain how these techniques can be used to generate specialized hardware. All optimizations and transformations are implemented in an extensible DSL compiler architecture that minimizes the programmer effort required to develop new DSLs.