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Type o

f Talk: UTCS Distinguished Lecture Series

Speaker/Affiliation: Charle

s E. Leiserson/Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow, MIT CSAIL

Talk Audie

nce: UTCS Faculty, Graduate Students, Undergraduate Students, and Outsid

e Interested Parties

Date/Time: March 20, 2012, 11:00 a.m.

Loca

tion: ACES 2.302

Host: Professors Keshav Pingali and Vijaya Ramachandr

an

Talk Title: The Pochoir Stencil Compiler

Talk Abstract:
Many
high-end scientific applications --- in diverse areas including physics,

biology, chemistry, energy, climate, mechanical and electrical engineer

ing, finance, and recreational mathematics --- perform stencil computatio

ns in their inner loops. At every time step, a stencil computation update

s each point of a d-dimensional grid as a function of itself and its near n

eighbors. Stencil computations are conceptually simple to implement using

nested loops, but looping implementations suffer from poor cache performan

ce. Efficient parallel cache-oblivious stencil algorithms are known which

step time nonuniformly across the grid, but ordinary programmers find them
difficult to write.

Pochoir provides a domain-specific stencil lang

uage embedded in C++ which the Pochoir compiler can translate into high-per

forming parallel cache-oblivious Cilk Plus code. Pochoir supports general

d-dimensional stencils and handles both periodic and aperiodic boundary con

ditions in one unified algorithm. A host of stencil benchmarks demonstrate

s that Pochoir outperforms standard parallel-loop implementations on multic

ore machines, typically running 2-10 times faster and often over 100 times
faster than a serial-loop implementation on a modern 12-core computer.

n
This talk describes joint work with Rezaul Chowdhury of Stony Brook Uni

versity, Bradley Kuszmaul of MIT CSAIL, Chi-Keung Luk of Intel, and Yuan
Tang of Fudan University, China.

Speaker Bio:
Charles E. Leiserson
received the B.S. degree in computer science and mathematics from Yale Uni

versity in 1975 and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from Carnegie Mell

on University in 1981. He joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institut

e of Technology in 1981, where he currently holds the position of Professo

r of Computer Science and Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engin

eering and Computer Science (EECS). He leads the Supertech Research Group

and is member of the Theory of Computation research group in the MIT Comput

er Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He is a Margare

t MacVicar Faculty Fellow at MIT, the highest recognition at MIT for under

graduate teaching. He is an ACM Fellow and a Senior Member of IEEE and SIA

M.