Oct 31, 2011: OOSPLA 2011 @SPLASH2011, Day 2
The second day of the technical tracks started with a keynote by Markus Püschel. He is not the typical programming language researcher you meet at OOPSLA, but he does research in automatic optimization of programs. In his keynote, he showed a number of examples how to get the best performance for a given algorithm out of a particular processor architecture. Today’s compilers are still not up to the task, and will probably never be up to it. Given a naïve implementation, hand-optimized C code can have 10x speedup when dependencies are made explicit, and the compiler knows that no aliasing can happen. He was then discussing how that can be approached in an automated way, and was also thinking about what programming languages could do.
Oct 29, 2011: OOSPLA 2011 @SPLASH2011, Day 1
The first day of the technical tracks including OOPSLA started with a keynote by Ivan Sutherland titled The Sequential Prison. His main point was that the way we think and the way we build machines and software is based on sequential concepts. The words we use to communicate and express ourselves are often of a very sequential nature. His examples included: call, do, repeat, program, and instruction. Other examples that shape and restrict our way of thinking are for instance basic data structures and concepts like strings (character sequences). However, we also use words that enable thinking about concurrency and parallelism much better. His examples for these included: configure, pipeline, connect, channel, network, and path.
Oct 26, 2011: DLS'11 and VMIL'11 @SPLASH2011
The second conference day was unfortunately full of “conflicts of interest”… It was pretty hard to choose between all the talks on the schedule.
Oct 24, 2011: Transitioning to Multicore @SPLASH2011
And here we go again: SPLASH 2011 has started with its first day of workshops.