HPC Garage

We just got word that Aparna's, Kath Knobe's (Intel), and my paper will get the Best Paper Award in the software track at the IEEE Int'l. Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), which will be held here in Atlanta in April. The paper is the first performance evaluation of a relatively new parallel programming model, called Concurrent Collections (CnC), on state-of-the-art multicore systems. It shows of CnC's extraordinary potential, using examples from dense linear algebra.

Congratulations to the team. We owe many thanks to our friends and colleagues at Intel (Frank Schlimbach, Geoff Lowney, Shin Lee, and CK Luk) and Rice University (Vivek Sarkar and Zoran Budimlić) for their feedback, encouragement, and support during the course of this work. 

Sangmin Park's paper on fault localization applied to concurrent programs has been accepted for publication! The paper will appear at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), to be held in Cape Town, South Africa in May 2010. This paper describes a novel technique for pinpointing the cause of program failure in multithreaded Java software. Sangmin designed and implemented this approach in a prototype tool called "Falcon." This effort is joint between Prof. Mary Jean Harrold (Sangmin's primary advisor) and The HPC Garage.

• S. Park, R. Vuduc, M. J. Harrold. "Falcon: Fault Localization for Concurrent Programs." In Proc. ACM/IEEE Int'l. Conf. Software Eng. (ICSE), Cape Town, South Africa, May 2010. (accepted)

The HPC Garage will have two papers at the upcoming IPDPS conference, to be held here in Atlanta, April 19--23. Congratulations to Aparna, who led the two papers, as well as our colleagues at Intel (Kath Knobe) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Sam Williams and Lenny Oliker) for their significant contributions!

Here's a brief description of the papers ...

Rich just returned from the R&D 100 Awards Ceremony, where colleagues from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Vienna University of Technology, University of Texas at San Antonio, and Indiana University, and he received an award for the ROSE Compiler Infrastructure. Dr. Dan Quinlan at LLNL leads the effort. Congratulations to the team!

The US DOE-sponsored workshop on Libraries and Autotuning for Petascale Systems, held from Aug. 10–12 in Tahoe City, California, just completed. Jack Dongarra, Keith Cooper, Kathy Yelick, and Rich co-organize this annual research meeting. Perhaps not surprisingly, the most contentious discussion took place on the definition of autotuning!

The meeting slides are posted here: http://www.cs.utk.edu/~dongarra/cscads-libtune09.htm

Our co-authored paper on multicore optimizations for sparse matrix-vector multiply was the “hottest” (most downloaded) Journal of Parallel Computing (ParCo) article in Q1 2009. 

[ParCo Top 25 List, Q1 2009] S. Williams, L. Oliker, R. Vuduc, J. Shalf, K. Yelick, J. Demmel. “Optimization of sparse matrix-vector multiplication on emerging multicore platforms.” J. Par. Comput. (ParCo), 35(3), pp. 178—194, March 2009. doi:10.1016/j.parco.2008.12.006