Four members of the CC Chair participated in the 2022 Rewe Team Challenge Dresden (4x5km), after three years of our last participation. Conny Okuma, Robert Khasanov, Julian Robledo and Jeronimo Castrillon made a mixed team that got place 289 out of 1602 teams. The total time of 1:45:06 was only slightly better than the time from 2019 of 1:45:44. More training is needed for next time!
We congratulate Asif Khan for having successfully defended his PhD on April 25th, 2022. Asif joined our team a bit less than five years ago in May 2017. Together with Fazal, Asif helped shape most of the work on emerging technologies at the CC Chair. He worked on several memory and in-memory architectures and developed pioneering compiler optimizations for systems with emerging memory technologies. His work has been published in several renown conferences and journals, including DAC, DATE, LCTES, CASES, ACM TECS, ACM TACO, IEEE TCAD and IEEE TC. Today he defended his thesis on "Design and code optimization for systems with next-generation racetrack memories” in a hybrid setup, with family and friends connecting remotely. Special thanks go to Prof. Yiran Chen from Duke University for acting as external reviewer. We are more than happy that Asif will stay with us as PostDoc for the near future!
The CC Chair, together with Prof. Christian Pilato and Dr. Christoph Hagleitner, organised a workshop at the DATE Conference 2022 entitled "Data-driven applications for industrial and societal challenges: Problems, methods, and computing platforms" (DATA-DREAM'22). The workshop provided an international forum for researchers in the field of large-scale data analysis technologies to discuss challenges and ideas for the future of big data analytics. Participants shared their insights into current political, economic and technological developments, and placed special focus on their approaches to overcoming the hurdles towards wide adoption of reconfigurable computing platforms. This event is an initiative of the EVEREST project, which we hope will trigger collaborations and awareness in the community.
TU Dresden has been one of the 21 partners of Software Campus since 2017. Here, master's and doctoral students of computer science receive further training and are prepared for leadership positions. In the process, participants in the program lead their own IT research project and manage the entire process independently. They receive support from experienced leaders. Each project is funded by the BMBF with up to 100,000 euros over a period of two years.
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).
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.