Alex Aiken
Alcatel-Lucent Professor of Computer Science -- Stanford
Programming Distributed Heterogeneous Architectures with Logical Regions
Abstract:
Modern
supercomputers now encompass both heterogeneous processors and deep,
complex memory hierarchies. Programming these machines currently
requires expertise in an eclectic collection of tools (MPI, OpenMP,
CUDA, etc.) that primarily focus on describing parallelism while
placing the burden of data movement on the programmer. Legion is an
alternative approach that provides extensive support for describing the
structure of program data through logical regions. Logical regions can
be dynamically partitioned into sub-regions giving applications an
explicit mechanism for directly conveying information about locality
and independence to the Legion runtime. Using this information, Legion
automatically extracts task parallelism and orchestrates data movement
through the memory hierarchy. Time permitting; we will discuss results
from several applications including a port of S3D, a production
combustion simulation running on Titan, the Department of Energy's
current flagship supercomputer
Bio: Alex Aiken is the
Alcatel-Lucent Professor of Computer Science at Stanford. He received
his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1988 after which he became a
Research Staff Member at the IBM Almaden Research Center (1988-1993)
and a Professor in the EECS department at UC Berkeley (1993-2003)
before joining the Stanford faculty in 2003. He is an ACM Fellow, a
recipient of Phi Beta Kappa's Teaching Award, and a former National
Young Investigator.