Chair News

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The FPGA for HPC workshop (HPCFPGA'21) targets FPGA technologies for High Performance Computing, and focuses on topics including hardware synthesis, high bandwidth memory, design optimization, and interconnected clusters of FPGA devices. At the workshop, Karl Friebel presented the paper "From Domain-Specific Languages to Memory-Optimized Accelerators for Fluid Dynamics". This marks the first joint publication of researchers from Politecnico di Milano, and in particular Prof. Christian Pilato's group, and our team in the context of the EU H2020 EVEREST Project. Karl described a prototype implementation of an end-to-end DSL-to-FPGA compilation flow for scientific computing.

 

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On July 9, Prof. Castrillon gave the closing keynote address at the Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing (PASC) Conference, co-sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS). PASC is a thriving conference that brings together researchers from the scientific computing, the computational science, and the computer science communities. Prof. Castrillon talked about how domain specific languages and compilers are badly needed to democratise high-performance computing, especially in the advent of emerging technologies and new computing non Von Neumann paradigms. The slides of the talk are available and a recording of the virtual keynote will be made available later in the year (here). 

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Hauke Mewes, a former Masters's thesis student at the chair for Compiler Construction, was awarded the N. J. Lehmann Price award 2021 for his work "Towards Optimizing Compilers for Systems with Racetrack Memories". The N.J.Lehmann award, named after the renowned TU Dresden alumni Nikolaus Joachim Lehmann (1921-1998), is awarded every two years to two outstanding theses at TU Dresden in the fields of Computer Science and Mathematics. The award particularly encourages research at the intersection of mathematics and real-world systems. Asif Ali Khan supervised Hauke's work at the chair, which turned into an excellent publication "Polyhedral Compilation for Racetrack Memories" at the peer-reviewed IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD). Hauke developed a prototype compiler to optimize and generate efficient codes for systems with racetrack memories. The award was handed over at this year's OUTPUT.DD science event, where Hauke also briefly talked about his work (see video). We are proud of Hauke's achievement and wish him all the best in his current and future endeavors.

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Andrés, who recently finished his PhD at the CC chair to then join the Barkhausen Institute, presented his work on “Embeddings of Task Mappings to Multicore Systems” at this year’s SAMOS Conference. What a pity that he couldn’t enjoy a trip to the beautiful island of Samos in Greece and profit from the the great atmosphere that characterises the conference. Andrés talked about an innovative way to think about the optimization space that arises when mapping applications to multicores. His approach makes it possible to transfer geometry-based optimization approaches to an otherwise complex and unstructured discrete space. 

 

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Alex Brauckmann, a member of the CC Chair from 2020, has been awarded the “Zeiss Diplompreis für Informatik” for his thesis “Investigating Input Representations and Representation Models of Source Code for Machine Learning”, supervised by Andres Goens. Alex’s thesis was the basis for a paper on “Compiler-Based Graph Representations for Deep Learning Models of Code” at the renown ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Compiler Construction (CC’20), featuring a novel deep learning method that improves predictive compiler heuristics. The Zeiss prize is awarded to outstanding thesis work at TU Dresden and the HTW Dresden in the areas of Scientific Computing, Machine Learning, Image Processing and Framework Design. Due to the pandemic, Alex couldn't receive the honour during this year's OUTPUT.DD science event, so we had to improvise a picture. We are happy for Alex and proud to have him in our team! 

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The CC Chair was present at the 21st International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS), which was held online during the week of June 14 2021. ICCS is an A-ranked conference bringing together researchers and scientists from different disciplines to highlight the role of recent developments and challenges in computational science. Nesrine presented our work entitled “The OpenPME Problem Solving Environment for Numerical Simulations”. In this work, Nesrine introduces the OpenPME domain-specific language (DSL) for particle-mesh simulations that is built atop a domain metamodel general enough to cover the main types of numerical simulations: simulations using particles, meshes, and hybrid combinations of particles and meshes. This work is a collaboration with professor Ivo Sbalzarini and his group at the Chair of Scientific Computing for Systems Biology.

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logo silexica

 

Prof. Castrillon co-founded Silexica in 2014, as spin-off of his work at the ICE Institute at the RWTH Aachentogether with Weihua Sheng, Max Odendahl and his doctoral advisor Prof. Leupers. Silexica has been successfully producing bleeding edge C/C++ compilers and programming technology for heterogeneous computing systems since then, and secured over 28 million USD from international investors in the process. On June 10, 2021 Xilinx, a world leader in FPGA technology with around 5,000 employees, announced the acquisition of Silexica. We are particularly looking forward to see the result of the integration of Silexica’s SLX FPGA with Xilinx’ VitisTM. The CC Chair is proud of Maximilian Odendahl (Silexica’s CEO), Johannes Emigholz (Silexica’s COO)  and the rest of the team at Silexica for the amazing work over the past years!

 

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We congratulate Andrés Goens for having successfully defended his PhD on April 30th, 2021. Andrés was the first researcher to join the CC Chair, back then in October 2014 (one of the first entries in this news feed). Andrés has been an incredible support for the team, helping shape the research of those that came after him (see all his collaborative work in his publication list). Today he defended his thesis on “Improving Model-based Software Synthesis: A Focus on Mathematical Structures”, virtually as it is common for these times, with participation of family, friends and colleagues alongside a jury composed of five university professors. We thank Prof. Andy D. Pimentel from the University of Amsterdam for acting as external reviewer. We wish Andrés the best of luck as he moves on with his career!

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With great pleasure we welcome Galina Kozyreva to our team at the Chair for Compiler Construction. Galina obtained her diploma in Computer Science from the Saint Petersburg State University of Aerospace and Instrumentation in 2015 and has been working since then as software engineer in various roles. This included work on databases, security, reactive software, micro services and data mining. With us, Galina will be working in the area of domain-specific languages and compilers, with focus on MLIR progressive lowering and advanced optimizations for parallel and emerging computing systems. We look forward to collaborative work with Galina and are extremely happy to have her with us!

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We are glad to welcome Karl Friebel to our team at the Chair for Compiler Construction. Karl recently finished his Diplom in Computer Science at TU Dresden with Prof. Diana Göhriger on source-to-source compilation for FPGA-based systems. Karl will be working in the project “EVEREST: Design environment for extreme-scale big data analytics on heterogeneous platforms”, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement no 957269. Karl will be working on domain-specific languages and optimizing compilers for heterogeneous systems. Prior to joining our team, Karl spent most of his studies working on enabling new hardware designs for legacy applications via compiler tooling. While his main focus was on the hardware design and tooling, Karl gained considerable experience in end-user applications, mainly in the area of scientific computing and fluid dynamics in particular. We look forward to working with Karl and tackle the challenges of programming large heterogeneous systems!