Martin Odersky: Domain-optimised parallelisation
© 2010 EPFL
The excellence of the research performed at EPFL has once again been recognized at an international level. Martin Maria Anton Nikolaus Odersky has received an ADVANCED GRANT 2010 from the European Research Council (ERC).
Domain-optimised parallelisation by polymorphic language embeddings and rewritings
Concurrent and parallel programming is becoming indispensable for exploiting modern hardware. Because possible speed increases of single processors have reached their limit, increasing transistor count will yield more, but not necessarily faster cores and this for the foreseeable future. This means that, from now on, parallelism in software will have to double every 18 months to keep up with hardware. This problem has been identified as the 'Popular Parallel Programming' grand challenge by the computer architecture community. The proposed project will research new ways to solve this challenge. We start with a set of domain-specific languages which naturally admit a high degree of parallelism. The domain specific languages are integrated in a common host language using polymorphic language embeddings. Such embeddings provide a high degree of abstraction, which gives considerable freedom in their actual representation and implementation. The new direction taken by this proposal is to combine polymorphic embeddings with optimizing rewritings in a staged compilation process. This can lead to highly parallel and efficient implementations on a variety of heterogeneous hardware.
Max ERC funding: 2.39 million Euros
Duration: 60 months
Host institution: EPFL
Project acronym: DOPPLER
Domain: Physical and Engineering Sciences