May 20, 2005
11-12:00, LH101

Generation of High-Performance Domain-Specific Languages from Component Libraries

Ken Kennedy

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 could facilitate a dramatic broadening of the community that can use high-performance computing platforms for problem solving.

Biography
Ken Kennedy is the John and Ann Doerr University Professor of Computational Engineering and Director of the Center for High Performance Software Research (HiPerSoft) at Rice University. He is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Association for the Advancement of of Science. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1990 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005. From 1997 to 1999, he served as co-chair of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC). For his leadership in producing the PITAC report on funding of information technology research, he received the Computing Research Association Distinguished Service Award (1999) and the RCI Seymour Cray HPCC Industry Recognition Award (1999).

Prof. Kennedy has published two books and over two hundred technical articles and supervised thirty-six Ph.D. dissertations on programming support software for high-performance computer systems. In 1989, he established the Center for Research on Parallel Computation (CRPC), a NSF Science and Technology Center, and directed it throughout its eleven-year lifetime. His research focuses on software for the support of high-level programming in science and engineering, with a particular emphasis on scalable parallel computers and the Grid. He directs the GrADS Project, a collaborative eight-institution research effort started in 1999 with NSF support, which is focused on application development support for computational Grids. He is also the project director of the academic partner contract for the Los Alamos Computer Science Institute, which is located at Los Alamos National Laboratory. 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.