Seminar on engineering parallel applications with tunable architectures

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News of an upcoming seminar from a brief post at Dr. Dobb’s

Current multicore computers differ significantly in hardware characteristics. Software developers therefore hand-tune parallel programs for a given platform to achieve best performance. This is tedious and leads to non-portable code. Although the architecture of parallel applications also requires adaptation to achieve best performance, it is rarely modified because of the additional effort.

In this presentation, Walter F. Tichy of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology presents the Tunable Architectures approach which proposes to automate the architecture adaptation of parallel programs and uses an auto-tuner to find the best-performing architectural choice for a given machine. Tichy introduces a new architecture description language based on parallel patterns and a framework for expressing architecture variants in a generic way. Several case studies demonstrate significant performance improvements due to automatic architecture tuning and show the applicability of our approach to industrial applications.

The event is on Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 4:00 PM (Central Time); point your browser to media.cs.uiuc.edu/live/upcrc0910/.asx for a live video feed (but not til next Wed at 4, obviously).