Colloquium - Fred Kjolstad, "Domain-Specific Software, Hardware, and their Composition"

Abstract: 
Computer scientists have always built languages and libraries to make it easier to write software for different domains. In the last decade, the demand for performance has dramatically increased due to more expensive uses of more data. To deliver this performance, we are increasingly turning to specialized hardware. Such hardware places a large burden on the software stack and increases the need for compilers and programming models to be portable.

I will share my thoughts on designing programming systems that permit portable compilation across disparate hardware. These programming systems must raise the level of abstraction to diverse operations on abstract collections. (I think four such collections cover the lion’s share of large-scale computing.) By raising the level of abstraction and by introducing new compiler techniques, we can make programs portable across different machines and different data structures. To manage complexity, compilers should target hardware-facing abstract machines that separate the software and hardware implementations. Finally, intermediate languages can also help us describe hardware to the compiler, so that we can target it without rewriting large parts of the compiler.

Bio:
Fredrik Kjolstad is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Stanford University. He works on topics in compilers, programming models, and systems, with an emphasis on compiler techniques that make high-level languages portable. He has received the NSF CAREER Award, the MIT EECS Sprowls PhD Thesis Award in Computer Science, the Tau Beta Phi 2024 Teaching Honor Roll, the Rosing Award, an Adobe Fellowship, a Google Research Scholarship, and several distinguished paper awards.