IC Colloquium : It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)
Event details
| Date | 14.09.2012 |
| Hour | 16:15 › 17:30 |
| Speaker | James Larus, Microsoft Research |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Abstract
The end of Dennard scaling and the imminent end of semiconductor feature scaling means that software systems and applications will no longer benefit from 40% per annum performance increases, a continually rising tide that lifted all boats. Future software developers will work harder to find the capability to support productive, high-level programming languages; richer, more natural models of human-computer interactions; and new, compute-intensive applications.
This talk focuses on what software can do to find the performance headroom that we need. The solutions to this problem are more diverse and challenging than our previous path, and do not promise 40 years of uninterrupted progress. Nevertheless, they are necessary. Some of these improvements are the performance engineering discipline that has only been necessary in cutting-edge systems, while others are opportunities to change the way in which software is developed. The new emphasis on performance, monitoring, adaptation and new ways of developing software should also lead the hardware and architecture communities to revisit the long-standing debate on the hardware-software interface.
Biography :
James Larus is a Principal Researcher in Microsoft Research. Larus has been an active contributor to the programming languages, compiler, software engineering, and computer architecture communities. He published many papers, received 29 US patents, and served on numerous program committees and NSF and NRC panels. His book, Transactional Memory (Morgan Claypool) appeared in 2007. Larus became an ACM Fellow in 2006.
Larus joined Microsoft Research as a Senior Researcher in 1998 to start and lead the Software Productivity Tools (SPT) group, which developed and applied a variety of innovative program analysis techniques to develop new tools to find software defects. This group's research had considerable impact on the research community (2011 SIGPLAN Most Influential Paper and the 2011 CAV Award), as well as being shipped in Microsoft products such as the Static Driver Verifier, FX/Cop, and other widely-used software development tools. Larus became a MSR Research Area Manager for programming languages and tools and started the Singularity research project, which demonstrated that modern programming languages and software engineering techniques can fundamentally improve software architectures. Subsequently, he helped start XCG, an effort in MSR to develop hardware and software support for cloud computing. In XCG, Larus led groups developing the Orleans framework for cloud programming and computer hardware projects.
Before joining Microsoft, Larus was an Assistant and Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he published approximately 60 research papers and co-led the Wisconsin Wind Tunnel (WWT) research project with Professors Mark Hill and David Wood. WWT was a DARPA and NSF-funded project investigated new approaches to simulating, building, and programming parallel shared-memory computers. Larus’s research spanned a number of areas: including new and efficient techniques for measuring and recording executing programs’ behavior, tools for analyzing and manipulating compiled and linked programs, programming languages for parallel computing, tools for verifying program correctness, and techniques for compiler analysis and optimization.
Larus received his MS and PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989, and an AB in Applied Mathematics from Harvard in 1980. At Berkeley, Larus developed one of the first systems to analyze Lisp programs and determine how to best execute them on a parallel computer.
The end of Dennard scaling and the imminent end of semiconductor feature scaling means that software systems and applications will no longer benefit from 40% per annum performance increases, a continually rising tide that lifted all boats. Future software developers will work harder to find the capability to support productive, high-level programming languages; richer, more natural models of human-computer interactions; and new, compute-intensive applications.
This talk focuses on what software can do to find the performance headroom that we need. The solutions to this problem are more diverse and challenging than our previous path, and do not promise 40 years of uninterrupted progress. Nevertheless, they are necessary. Some of these improvements are the performance engineering discipline that has only been necessary in cutting-edge systems, while others are opportunities to change the way in which software is developed. The new emphasis on performance, monitoring, adaptation and new ways of developing software should also lead the hardware and architecture communities to revisit the long-standing debate on the hardware-software interface.
Biography :
James Larus is a Principal Researcher in Microsoft Research. Larus has been an active contributor to the programming languages, compiler, software engineering, and computer architecture communities. He published many papers, received 29 US patents, and served on numerous program committees and NSF and NRC panels. His book, Transactional Memory (Morgan Claypool) appeared in 2007. Larus became an ACM Fellow in 2006.
Larus joined Microsoft Research as a Senior Researcher in 1998 to start and lead the Software Productivity Tools (SPT) group, which developed and applied a variety of innovative program analysis techniques to develop new tools to find software defects. This group's research had considerable impact on the research community (2011 SIGPLAN Most Influential Paper and the 2011 CAV Award), as well as being shipped in Microsoft products such as the Static Driver Verifier, FX/Cop, and other widely-used software development tools. Larus became a MSR Research Area Manager for programming languages and tools and started the Singularity research project, which demonstrated that modern programming languages and software engineering techniques can fundamentally improve software architectures. Subsequently, he helped start XCG, an effort in MSR to develop hardware and software support for cloud computing. In XCG, Larus led groups developing the Orleans framework for cloud programming and computer hardware projects.
Before joining Microsoft, Larus was an Assistant and Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he published approximately 60 research papers and co-led the Wisconsin Wind Tunnel (WWT) research project with Professors Mark Hill and David Wood. WWT was a DARPA and NSF-funded project investigated new approaches to simulating, building, and programming parallel shared-memory computers. Larus’s research spanned a number of areas: including new and efficient techniques for measuring and recording executing programs’ behavior, tools for analyzing and manipulating compiled and linked programs, programming languages for parallel computing, tools for verifying program correctness, and techniques for compiler analysis and optimization.
Larus received his MS and PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989, and an AB in Applied Mathematics from Harvard in 1980. At Berkeley, Larus developed one of the first systems to analyze Lisp programs and determine how to best execute them on a parallel computer.
Links
Practical information
- Informed public
- Free
- This event is internal
Contact
- Christine Moscioni