Chair News

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The International Conference on Field-Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL) was the first and remains the largest conference on field-programmable logic and reconfigurable computing, and the 32nd edition of the FPL Conference was hosted by Queen's University Belfast, UK, from the 29th of August to the 2nd of September. Two members of the CC Chair participated in this edition presenting the results of their work. On the 31st of August, João Paulo presented "Data and Computation reuse of CNN in Memristor TCAMs" as a regular paper at the main event. His paper explores data repetition and similarities in image and video recognition tasks, in which ternary content-addressable memories are used to retrieve previously computed activation values. On the 1st of September, Karl Friebel delivered his talk entitled "Creating reusable MLIR abstractions for heterogeneous systems" at the 3rd Workshop on DevOps Support for Cloud FPGA platforms (DevOps). In this talk, Karl shares his experiences with MLIR for heterogeneous systems and shows how his current dialect stack for high-performance reconfigurable systems creates composable, reusable tool flows.

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With the third entry of this type in 2022, we welcome Clément Fournier to our team. Clément obtained double degrees on computer science and computer engineering from the TU Dresden and the Institut national des sciences appliquées (INSA), Rennes in 2022.  Clément has worked as research student and finished his Diploma thesis in our team in 2021, where we worked on “A Rust Backend for Lingua Franca”. He has continued to work on Lingua Franca with Christian Menard, in a cooperation with the UC Berkeley. Clément also did an internship with the compiler team of AMD in Cologne. With his expertise in high-level compilers (e.g., for machine learning), static code analysis, language design, among others, Clément will enrich our team. We are therefore very happy to have him with us and look forward to continued research!

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We are glad to welcome another new member to the team this summer! This time, a warm Willkommen goes to Hamid Farzaneh who joins us from Iran. Hamid obtained his bachelors degree from the Shiraz University in 2019 and his masters degree from the Shahid Beheshti University in late 2021, both on computer engineering. His expertise lies on architectures and programming models for emerging computing systems. Hamid will be working with Asif on multi-level abstractions (e.g. using MLIR) for near and in-memory computing in the context of the SPP 2377 on disruptive memory technologies. We look forward to collaborative research within the SPP 2377 and are extremely happy to finally have Hamid with us!

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Andrés Goens, a former member of the CC Chair (2014-2021), has been awarded the “Cloud & Heat Dissertationspreis” for his thesis “Improving Model-based Software Synthesis”. Andrés’ thesis encompasses much of his work at the CC Chair, including 25 different co-authored publications during his PhD research time at the chair. As the title suggests, it deals with model-based software synthesis, one of the main areas of research at our chair. The Cloud & Heat prize is awarded to outstanding doctoral dissertation work at TU Dresden. Andrés is now at the University of Edinbugh, in Scotland, where he works on verification and interactive theorem proving, focusing on the Lean theorem prover, hardware description languages and weak memory models. He couldn't join us during this year's OUTPUT.DD science event in person, so we had to improvise a picture. We are happy for Andrés, congratulations!

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The design automation conference (DAC) is a premier event for academics and industry working on the design and automation of electronic chips to systems. DAC 2022 was organized in San Francisco, California, from 10-14 July with over 5500 participants and over 200 emerging and leading companies exhibiting their solutions. Asif Ali Khan represented the chair for compiler construction and talked to like-minded researchers and industry experts working in emerging memory technologies and architectures, and their optimizations for various application domains. Asif also visited Prof. Alex K. Jones's group at the University of Pittsburgh to discuss our ongoing collaboration on accelerating genomics applications using racetrack memories.

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We are happy to welcome João Cardoso to the CC chair! João obtained his bachelors (2016) and masters (2019) degrees in computer engineering and computer science from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) and the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), in Brasil. Since then, he has been working with Prof. Luigi Carro at UFRGS as a PhD student on low-precision training of neural networks with emerging computing platforms. We are looking forward to working with João and on possible collaboration with Prof. Luigi Carro! In our group, João will be joining the large-scale SCADS.AI project. In this context, he will investigate software optimization methodologies for emerging architectures and novel algorithms in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Welcome to the team! 

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graphic with text '10 software campus' and a tree

This year’s HiPEAC conference was moved from winter to June 20 to improve in-person participation. This worked and it was great to see 200+ HiPEAC members in Budapest! The CC chair co-organized a workshop around the topics of the EVEREST project and contributed two talks to the conference. The first one opened the PARMA-DITAM workshop, where Prof. Castrillon talked about tool flows for high-performance reconfigurable computing, reporting on latest results from the EVEREST project and proving an research outlook on emerging in- and near-memory computing paradigms. In the second talk, within EVEREST workshop, Prof. Castrillon talked about domain specific languages and compilation flows in the EVEREST project. Both talks were visited and discussions were plentiful. Looking forward to other HiPEAC events! 

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We are happy to host Francesco Ratto at the CC Chair. He is a PhD student enrolled in the Electronics engineering and Computer science program (DRIEI) at the University of Cagliari. He received the Masters degree in Electrical engineering from the same university in 2020. He is co-supervised by Prof. Luigi Raffo (University of Cagliari) and Prof. Francesca Palumbo (University of Sassari). He works on adaptive deployment of CNNs and on the design of multithread accelerators for FPGAs for signal processing applications. At the CC Chair, he will be working on hybrid mapping of 5G baseband processing on heterogenous platforms under the supervision of Robert Khasanov and Julian Robledo. Big thanks go to the funding instruments for this exchange, provided by Ph.D. mobility scholarship of the the University of Cagliar and the Erasmus+ Traineeship PLACEDOC program.

 

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graphic with text '10 software campus' and a tree

On June 14 2022, Prof. Castrillon gave the keynote address at the 23rd ACM SIGPLAN/SIGBED International Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems (LCTES 2022) during the PLDI week in San Diego, California. In the keynote, Prof. Castrillon talked about “Domain-specific programming methodologies for domain-specific and emerging computing systems”, looking back to work on tensor expression languages that started in collaborations within the cfaed excellence cluster around 2017, reporting on current efforts to generate efficient reconfigurable architectures in the context of the EVEREST project, and with an outlook on compilers for emerging in and near-memory computing systems (upcoming work in the context of the SPP 2377 Disruptive Memory Technologies among other projects at the CC Chair). The talk was well attended (both physically and virtually) and led to interesting exchanges with LCTES and PLDI attendees. Big thanks go to Prof. Tobias Grosser (General Chair) and Prof. Kyoungwoo Lee (Program Chair) for the invitation and for putting together such an interesting program.

 

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The CC chair was present at this year's International Workshop on Context-Oriented Programming and Advanced Modularity (COP), one of the workshops centered around modularity and context-oriented software. At COP, Lars presented Guard the Cache: Dispatch Optimization in a Contextual Role-oriented Language, a work extending prior publications to more dynamic domains; a result of a bachelor's thesis by Cornelius Kummer. COP also accepted another work by co-author Lars titled Modeling Flexible Monitoring Systems with a Role-Based Control Loop. The work is a collaboration with members of the DFG-funded RoSI graduate school.