Guest Speaker: Louis-Noel Pouchet

Louis-Noel Pouchet
Visiting Assistant Professor
University of California, Los Angeles

Talk Abstract: For application developers, the era of improved performance "for free" by means of increased clock speed and on-chip instruction-level parallelism is over. We saw dramatic and disruptive changes to the cope, with multi-core processors becoming ubiquitous, and power density and energy considerations becoming the primary constraints driving technology directions. Customized accelerators, as illustrated by the work of the Center for Domain-Specific Computing, emerge as one of the key components to achieve the power efficiency demanded in the next-generation computing devices. Non-homogeneous CPU cores and ever-increasing complexity of System-on-Chips are on the roadmap of most manufacturers. In a word, computing platforms are now heterogeneous, after decades of mass-marketing homogeneous single-core x86 processors. These developments have dramatically changed the role and expectations of optimizing compilers: we expect from them high performance of the application for a wide variety of targets, which is absolutely critical both for embedded and mainstream computing as well as the push to exascale computing at the high end. Three key challenges have arisen from these changes, and must be tackled to deliver the much anticipated energy and execution time improvements those architectures have been designed for.

• Performance portability, to improve the productivity of developers.
• Application modeling, to bridge the semantics gap between the application designer and the input to the compilation toolchain.
• Hardware acceleration, to leverage the purpose-optimized computing capability of the hardware for a given application.

In this talk I will present current and upcoming research to address the above challenges, crossing the boundaries between application design, compiler optimization, and architectural configuration; and give perspective on the next milestones in optimizing compilation research in the big data era.

About the Speaker: Louis-Noel Pouchet is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is an active member of the NSF Center for Domain-Specific Computing (CDSC), working on both software and hardware customization. He is working on domain-specific languages and compilers for scientific computing, and has designed numerous optimizing compilation approaches to effectively map applications to CPUs, FPGAs and SoCs. He is also the author of PolyOpt, PoCC and PolyBench, three software packages dedicated to polyhedral compilation.

Host: P Sadayappan

* Louis-Noel Pouchet is a CSE faculty candidate