Seminars

View all Seminars  |  Download ICal for this event

Automating Distributed Heterogeneous Computing for Python Programmers

Series: Department Seminar

Speaker: Prof. Vivek Sarkar, Chair, School of Computer Science, and Stephen Fleming Chair for Telecommunications, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology

Date/Time: May 19 16:00:00

Location: CSA Seminar Hall (Room No. 254, First Floor)

Faculty Advisor:

Abstract:
Multiple simultaneous disruptions are currently under way in both hardware and software, as we consider the implications for future HPC systems. In hardware, “extreme heterogeneity” has become critical to sustaining cost and performance improvements after Moores Law, but poses significant productivity challenges for developers. In software, the rise of large-scale data science and AI applications is being driven by domain experts from diverse backgrounds who demand the programmability that they have come to expect from high-level languages like Python. While current foundations for compiler and runtime technologies have served us well for many decades, we now see signs of their limitations in the face of these disruptions. This talk makes a case for new approaches to enable productivity and programmability of future HPC systems for domain scientists, and discusses preliminary results obtained in response to the challenge of automating distributed heterogeneous computing for Python programmers.

Speaker Bio:
Vivek Sarkar is Chair of the School of Computer Science and the Stephen Fleming Chair for Telecommunications in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. He conducts research in multiple aspects of programmability and productivity in parallel computing, including programming languages, compilers, runtime systems, and debuggers for parallel, heterogeneous, and high-performance computer systems. Sarkar started his career in IBM Research after obtaining his Ph.D. from Stanford University, supervised by John Hennessy. His research projects at IBM include the PTRAN automatic parallelization system led by Fran Allen, the ASTI optimizer for IBMs XL Fortran product compilers, the open-source Jikes Research Virtual Machine for the Java language, and the X10 programming language developed in the DARPA HPCS program. He was a member of the IBM Academy of Technology during 1995-2007. After moving to academia, Sarkar has mentored over 30 Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers in the Habanero Extreme Scale Software Research Laboratory, first at Rice University since 2007, and now at Georgia Tech since 2017. Researchers in his lab have developed the Habanero-C/C++ and Habanero-Java programming systems for parallel, heterogeneous, and distributed platforms. While at Rice, Sarkar was the E.D. Butcher Chair in Engineering, served as Chair of the Department of Computer Science, created a new sophomore-level course on the fundamentals of parallel programming, as well as a three-course Coursera specialization on parallel, concurrent, and distributed programming. Sarkar is an ACM Fellow and an IEEE Fellow. He has been serving as a member of the US Department of Energys Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee (ASCAC) since 2009, and on CRAs Board of Directors since 2015. He is also the recipient of the 2020 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award.

Host Faculty: Prof. Uday Kumar Reddy B