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Type of Talk: UTCS Colloquium

Speaker/Affiliation: Sorin Le

rner/University of California, San Diego

Date/Time: Thursday, Octobe

r 7, 2010, 11:00 a.m.

Location: ACES 2.302

Host: Kathryn McKinl

ey

Talk Title: Strategies for Building Correct Optimizations

Talk
Abstract:
Program analyses and optimizations are at the core of many opt

imizing
compilers, and their correctness in this setting is critically

nimportant because it affects the correctness of any code that is
compile

d. However, designing correct analyses and optimizations is
difficult,

error prone and time consuming. This talk will present
several inter-rela

ted approaches for building correct analyses and
optimizations. I will st

art with an approach based on a
domain-specific language for expressing o

ptimizations, combined with a
checker for verifying the correctness of o

ptimizations written in this
language. This first approach still requires
the programmer to write
down the optimizations in full detail. I will th

en move on to several
techniques which instead attempt to synthesize corr

ect optimizations
from a higher-level description. In particular, I will
present an
approach that discovers correct optimization opportunities by

exploring the application of equality axioms on the program being
opti

mized. Finally, I will present a technique that synthesizes
generally ap

plicable and correct optimization rules from concrete
examples of code be

fore and after some transformations have been
performed.

Speaker Bio

:
Sorin Lerner is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer

Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. He
r

eceived his PhD in 2006 from the University of Washington, under the
sup

ervision of Craig Chambers. Before that, he received an
undergraduate de

gree in Computer Engineering from McGill University,
Montreal. His resea

rch interests lie in programming language and
analysis techniques for mak

ing software systems easier to write,
maintain and understand, includin

g static program analysis, domain
specific languages, compilation, for

mal methods and automated theorem
proving. Lerner works actively at the i

nterface of Programming
Languages and Software Engineering, and frequent

ly publishes at
POPL/PLDI and ICSE/FSE. Sorin Lerner was the co-chair of

the 2010 ACM
SIGPLAN-SIGSOFT PASTE workshop, and is the recipient of an

NSF Career
Award (2007), and of the 2003 PLDI Best paper award.