Felix Suchert received his Bachelor's and Master's degree in Computer Science from the TU Dresden in September 2017 and August 2020, respectively. During his studies, he specialized in compilers, operating systems and natural language processing. Since his Bachelor's degree, he became a regular at the Chair for Compiler Construction, working with Sebastian Ertel on the Ohua compiler framework for implicit parallelism. In his master thesis he worked on language and compiler support in Ohua for the deterministic execution of parallel applications with shared state.

In November 2020 he joined the chair as research assistant, where he works on 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. Since early 2021 he is also involved in research regarding deterministic actor frameworks and their possible applications in cyber-physical systems.

I am highly interested in the topic of "compilers with a societal impact". How can our compiler research be applied to large-scale real-world problems? As part of the EVEREST project, which is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement no 957269, I am therefore looking into traffic simulation applications. Apart from that I'm also interested in deterministic parallel programming.

Traffic Routing — Dataflow Optimizations

Cars are for many people, especially those living in suburban areas, a necessity. But how can navigation systems route the daily traffic efficiently to minimize traffic jams and thereby pollution of the environment? Traffic simulators pose a simple, yet elegant solution to this question:

But given the size of even a single modern city's road network, these algorithms need optimizations on the dataflow level to make them more efficient and modular. This would allow the incorporation of additional modules like live weather prediction to route traffic away from potentially dangerous regions (e.g. in case of an upcoming storm or an approaching flood).

Hence, I am interested in finding optimizations on the dataflow level for large-scale applications like this, that also supports heterogeneous platforms like HPC and FPGAs.

Programming models and toolflows for cyber-physical systems (Reactors)

Together with Christian Menard I'm also working on applying the reactor model of computation to the programming of cyber-physical systems (CPS). The goal is to develop a toolflow that helps to build safer and more reliable software for CPS. An overview of this research topic can be found here. For possible pre-defined topics, please refer to Christian's page for the time being.

A higher-level syntax for controlling quantum computers

In a collaboration with Riverlane, we are currently investigating programming concepts and higher-level models for the interaction of software with quantum computing circuits. In particular, we are interested in Deltalang, which is a domain specific language (DSL) embedded in python. In Deltalang, applications are modeled as dataflow graphs where nodes represent components in a quantum computer and edges represent computation. While such an abstraction is very useful, explicitly defining components and connecting edges is often tedious and can be error-prone. For this reason, we are looking for students interested in developing a higher-level syntax that is easier to use by programmers and that allows a compiler to implicitly derive the required dataflow graph. If applicable to deltaflow, this work could be based on our group's prior work in Ohua.

Are you interested in working in any of these areas?

If you are interested in participating in the research on any of these topics, either as SHK or as part of your curriculum, feel free to contact me via mail so we can have a chat.