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Talk1 h 7 min

SEJITS: embedded specializers to turn patterns-based designs into optimized parallel code

Timothy Mattson · CERN

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About

All software should be parallel software. This is natural result of the transition to a many core world. For a small fraction of the world's programmers (efficiency programmers), this is not a problem. They enjoy mapping algorithms onto the details of a particular system and are well served by low level languages and OpenMP, MPI, or OpenCL. Most programmers, however, are "domain specialists" who write code. They are too busy working in their domain of choice (such as physics) to master the intricacies of each computer they use. How do we make these programmers productive without giving up performance?

We have been working with a team at UC Berkeley's ParLab to address this problem. The key is a clear software architecture expressed in terms of design patterns that exposes the concurrency in a problem. The resulting code is written using a patterns-based framework within a high level, productivity language (such as Python). Then a separate system is used by a small group of efficiency programmers to translate that code into a highly optimized program. This software transformation system is called SEJITS: Selective Embedded Just In Time Specializers.

In this talk, I will describe the overall vision behind this work, including the patterns that sit at its core. Most of the talk, however, will focus on SEJITS. We will explore how SEJITS works and show its use for a few applications. We'll close with some thoughts on where this technology might evolve and hopefully move into the mainstream of parallel computing.

About the speaker

Tim Mattson is a parallel programmer (Ph.D. Chemistry, UCSC, 1985). Tim has been with Intel since 1993 where he has worked with brilliant people on great projects such as:

the first TFLOP computer (ASCI Red),

the OpenMP API for shared memory programming,

the OpenCL programming language for heterogeneous platforms,

Intel's first TFLOP chip (the 80 core research chip), and

Intel's 48 core, SCC research processor.

Tim has published…

The talk

  1. SEJITS: embedded specializers to turn patterns-based designs into optimized parallel code 2012-09-28 · 1 h 7 min · CERN's player

Credits and licence

Institution
CERN
Department
Computing Seminar
Speaker
Timothy Mattson
Year
2012
Language
English
Subjects
Computer science
Source
CERN
Licence
CERN, as CERN states it. CERN's terms
Attribution
© CERN. CERN provides its audiovisual media free of charge for educational and informational use, credited to CERN; this lecture is shown in CERN's own player.
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