Nov 2, 2011: OOSPLA 2011 @SPLASH2011, Day 3
The third day started with Brendan Eich’s keynote on JavaScript’s world domination plan. It was a very technical keynote, not very typical I suppose. And he was rushing through his slides with an enormous speed. Good that I have some JavaScript background. Aside all the small things he mentioned, interesting for me is that he seemed to be very interested to get Intel’s RiverTrail approach to data-parallelism into ECMAScript in one or another form. That is kind of contradicting the position I heard so far, that ECMAScript would be done with having WebWorkers as a model for concurrency and parallel programming.
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 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.
Nov 2, 2010: SPLASH'10 Main Conference
Tuesday – Evolution, Onward!, FPGAs, and the Hera-JVM
Oct 30, 2010: Workshops at SPLASH 2010
As usual I will write about a few of my personal highlights of SPLASH and the co-located workshops. That is mostly from my spotty notes, and from memory, so I don’t guarantee 100% accuracy, especially with respect to what other people might have said.
Jul 6, 2010: Insertion Tree Phasers: Efficient and Scalable Barrier Synchronization for Fine-grained Parallelism
The last half year was an interesting departure from my actual PhD research. First, I though the idea of barriers and phasers might be interesting to incorporate into a virtual machine as part of my thesis, but as it turned out, they are much to high-level and are better off implemented in a library. The gain for direct support in a VM is just not proportional to the effort and restrictions which come with that step.