Four Languages for Portability

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Date and time: 6 September 2024, 15:00-16:00 CEST (UTC +2)
Speaker: Fredrik Kjolstad, Stanford University, USA
Title: Four Languages for Portability

Where: Digital Futures hub, Osquars Backe 5, floor 2 at KTH main campus OR Zoom
Directions: https://www.digitalfutures.kth.se/contact/how-to-get-here/
OR
Zoom: https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/66597450582

Abstract: Computer scientists have always built languages and libraries to make it easy to write software in different domains. In the last decade, performance demands have dramatically increased due to more expensive uses of more data. To deliver this performance, we have developed sophisticated computing environments that embrace both distributed-memory computing and specialized domain-specific accelerators. These environments place a large burden on the software stack and increase the need for compilers to generate specialized software implementations to target different hardware and to increase locality through tiling and fusion.

I will share my thoughts on designing programming systems that permit portable compilation across disparate hardware. These programming systems must raise the level of abstraction to sophisticated operations on abstract collections. (I think four such collections cover the lion’s share of large-scale computing.) By raising the level of abstraction and by introducing new compiler techniques, we can make the programming systems portable across different machines and different physical data structures. To manage complexity, compilers should target hardware-facing domain-specific abstract machines that separate software and hardware implementations. Finally, intermediate languages can also help us describe hardware to the compiler, so that we can target it without rewriting large parts of the compiler.