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Event Details

Kunle Olukotun

4:00 p.m.
October 7, 2009
Ford ITW Auditorium

Professor Kunle Olukotun, EECS Department, Stanford University
"The Pervasive Parallelism Laboratory (PPL)"
ABSTRACT:
This talk will give an overview of the Pervasive Parallelism Laboratory (PPL). The goal of the PPL is to make parallelism accessible to average software developers so that it can be freely used in all computationally demanding applications. The PPL pools the efforts of many leading Stanford computer scientists and electrical engineers with support from Sun Microsystems, Advanced Micro Devices, NVIDIA, IBM, Hewlett Packard and Intel. To drive the PPL research we are developing new applications in the domains of virtual worlds, personal robotics, and large-scale data informatics. These applications have the potential to exploit significant amounts of parallelism but also present significant software development challenges. The core of our research agenda is to allow domain experts to develop parallel software without becoming an expert in parallel programming. During the talk I will describe the key aspects of our approach, which include domain-specific languages (DSLs), an object-oriented common parallel runtime system, and an underlying architecture that provides efficient mechanisms for communication, synchronization, and performance monitoring.

BIO:
Kunle Olukotun is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University where he has been on the faculty since 1992. Olukotun has been a researcher in and proponent of chip multiprocessor technology since the mid 1990's. Olukotun is well known for leading the Stanford Hydra research project which developed one of the first chip multiprocessors with support for thread-level speculation (TLS). Olukotun founded Afara Websystems to develop high-throughput, low power server systems with chip multiprocessor technology. Afara was acquired by Sun Microsystems; the Afara microprocessor technology, called Niagara, is the basis of systems that have become one of Sun's fastest ramping products ever. Olukotun is actively involved in research in computer architecture, parallel programming environments and scalable parallel systems. Olukotun currently directs the Pervasive Parallelism Lab (PPL) which seeks to proliferate the use of parallelism in all application areas.

Olukotun is an ACM Fellow and IEEE Fellow. He has authored many papers on CMP design and parallel software and recently completed a book on CMP architecture. Olukotun received his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from The University of Michigan.

Hosted by EECS Professor Russell Joseph.
Northwestern University Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department