Type of Talk: UTCS Colloquium/Architecture

Speaker/Affilia

tion: Bill Mark/Intel

Date/Time: Monday, May 3, 2010, 4:00 p.m.

Location: ACES 2.402

Host: Kathryn McKinley

Talk Title:

Programming interfaces for manycore hardware as seen from a graphics perspe

ctive

Talk Abstract:

We are in the midst of the most exciting p

eriod in computer
architecture in many years.  The rising import

ance of power efficiency
and the increasing challenges to improving si

ngle-threaded performance
are leading industry to adopt manycore paral

lelism in virtually all
markets and to integrate special-function hard

ware along with
general-purpose computation.  But in this new wo

rld, it is not yet
clear what the abstraction layers between the appl

ication and the
hardware will ultimately look like, and what hardware
capabilities are
needed to support the new abstractions.  Answe

ring these questions
requires a deep understanding of the interaction

between the
application, the programming model, and the hardware.

In this talk, I will examine the current state of this evolution

as
illustrated by the data-parallel-oriented DirectCompute and OpenCL<

br />programming interfaces.  For example, these interfaces support

global
atomic operations in ways that are amenable to certain kinds of

hardware acceleration.  I''ll also discuss some of the limitati

ons of
these interfaces, and provide application examples from graphi

cs
workloads that motivate the need for more flexible interfaces in th

e
future.

Speaker Bio:

Bill Mark leads the advanced g

raphics research group at Intel.  Prior
to joining Intel he was

on the computer sciences faculty at the
University of Texas at Austin

, where his group investigated flexible
real-time 3D graphics techniqu

es and architectures.  From 2001-2002
Bill worked at NVIDIA as t

he technical lead for the design of the Cg
language.  Bill recei

ved his Ph.D. from the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill and
did postdoctoral research at Stanford
University.