[PAST EVENT] Computer Science Colloquium

January 24, 2014
3pm - 4pm
Location
McGlothlin-Street Hall, Room 020
251 Jamestown Rd
Williamsburg, VA 23185Map this location
Matching Non-Uniformity for Program Optimizations on Heterogeneous Many-Core Systems

Bo Wu, The College of William and Mary

Abstract: As computing enters an era of heterogeneity and massive parallelism, it exhibits a distinct feature: the deepening non-uniform relations among the computing elements in both hardware and software. Besides traditional non-uniform memory accesses, much deeper non-uniformity shows in a processor, runtime, and application, exemplified by the asymmetric cache sharing, memory coalescing, and thread divergences on multicore and many-core processors. Being oblivious to the non-uniformity, current applications fail to tap into the full potential of modern computing devices.

My research presents a systematic exploration into the emerging property. It examines the existence of such a property in modern computing, its influence on computing efficiency, and the challenges for establishing a non-uniformity aware paradigm. It focuses on three aspects of the non-uniformity and proposes several techniques to translate the property into efficiency, including data reorganization to eliminate non-coalesced accesses, asynchronous data transformations for locality enhancement and a controllable scheduling for exploiting non-uniformity among thread blocks. The experiments show much promise of these techniques in maximizing computing throughput, especially for programs with complex data access patterns.

Bio: Bo Wu is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at The College of William and Mary. His research lies in the broad field of compilers and programming systems, with an emphasis on program optimizations for heterogeneous computing and emerging architectures. He was the recipient of IBM CAS fellowship from 2011 to 2013.