Archive of posts with the tag parallel

• Jan 27, 2015: Partitioned Global Address Space Languages

  More than a decade ago, programmer productivity was identified as one of the main hurdles for future parallel systems. The so-called Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) languages try to improve productivity and explore a range of language design ideas. These PGAS languages are designed for large-scale high-performance parallel programming and provide the notion of a globally shared address space, while exposing the notion of explicit locality on the language level. Even so the main focus is high-performance computing, the language ideas are also relevant for the parallel and concurrent programming world in general.

• Jan 9, 2013: Parallel Gesture Recognition with Soft Real-Time Guarantees

  It has been a while since SPLASH’12, but I got finally around to put up a copy of our paper at the AGERE’12 workshop. It is based on Thierry’s master thesis and presents his work on parallelizing a Rete engine for gesture recognition. Lode and I were his advisors and are happily working with him on what we promised in the future work section.

• Nov 14, 2012: Sly and the RoarVM: Exploring the Manycore Future of Programming

  My second talk at Smalltalks 2012 was most likely the reason why the organizers invited me in the first place. It was a slightly extended version of the Sly and RoarVM talk for the FOSDEM Smalltalk Dev Room from the beginning of the year, reporting on the Renaissance Project.

• Nov 8, 2012: What If: Developing Applications in the Multicore Era

  Yesterday was the first day of Smalltalks 2012 in Puerto Madryn. The organizers invited my to give a keynote on a topic of my choice, which I gladly did. Having just handed in my thesis draft, I chose to put my research into the context of Smalltalk and try to relate it to one of the main open questions: How do we actually want to program multicore systems.

• Feb 5, 2012: FOSDEM Smalltalk Dev Room: Sly and the RoarVM

  Today, FOSDEM featured that first incarnation of a Smalltalk developer room. Unfortunately, FOSDEM is always packed with interesting talks, so, I only managed to attend a couple of talks. Most notably the talk on Spoon.

• 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.

• Aug 19, 2011: The Sly3 Programming Language

  The following introduction and analysis of the Sly3 programming language was written by Pablo Inostroza Valdera as part of his course work for the Multicore Programming course of Tom Van Cutsem. The assignment was to write a blog post about a topic of their own choice, and I repost Pablo’s work here with his permission to spread the word about Sly a bit wider. We made his article also available as part of his work for the Renaissance project itself.

• Dec 7, 2010: The Price of the Free Lunch: Programming in the Multicore Era

  Last Friday was the annual Lab event of our Software Languages Lab. Like last year, many people related to the lab in one or the other way came to get an overview of what the current topics of our research are.

• Jun 7, 2010: Trends in Concurrency 2010, part 1

  I already posted the presentation I gave at the summer school earlier. In the following posts, I will report a bit about the lectures of the summer school, similar to my posts about the TPLI summer school of last year.