Compiler positions available for week ending July 27

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Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:40:21 +0100
From: Alastair Donaldson <ally@codeplay.com>
Organization: Codeplay Software Ltd.
Subject: Ph.D. position in Software Performance Optimisation at Imperial
    College London, in collaboration with Codeplay Software


A Ph.D. position is available to work on "Language and Compiler Support
for Efficient Programming of Heterogeneous Multi-core Systems" at
Imperial College London, in collaboration with Codeplay Software,
Edinburgh. The 3-year studentship is funded by the EPSRC and Codeplay as
part of the EPSRC Industrial CASE programme.


Candidates should have a bachelorbs or master's degree in Computing
Science (or a similar degree at an equivalent academic level), strong
programming skills, and an interest in compilers and parallel
programming.


A full description of the project aims is given below.


Interested candidates should send a CV and covering email to
jobs<at>codeplay.com.


Language and Compiler Support for Efficient Programming of Heterogeneous
Multi-core Systems


To write high performance code for a parallel architecture such as the
Sony/IBM/Toshiba Cell Broadband Engine, the programmer must ensure that a
parallel algorithm manages the movement of data effectively. Data
movement is especially challenging on an architecture consisting of
multiple processing elements (PEs), where each PE has its own small local
memory. In this scenario, local memory can be accessed extremely quickly
without contention, but application data must be streamed into local
memory in time for processing. Orchestrating this data movement by hand
is a laborious, error-prone process, akin to assembly language
programming. There is a need for techniques to automate the generation
of efficient data movement code.


Unfortunately, compiler technology cannot generally determine data access
patterns for large, realistic applications. On the other hand, the
programmer may have expert knowledge of the application domain, leading
to a deep understanding of the data access pattern for a given
application. If the programmer could communicate this expert knowledge
to the compiler in a high-level, machine independent way, the compiler
could produce efficient data movement code for a specific architecture.
This approach allows the programmer to concentrate on writing high-level,
portable code, without compromising efficiency.


We are recruiting for a 3 year Ph.D. studentship to develop novel
techniques for automatic generation of data movement code. The selected
Ph.D. candidate will formulate an explicit, declarative language via
which programmers can supply information about data access patterns and
their relationship to the computational schedule. We propose that this
language be based on a polyhedral region calculus, possibly extended with
a declarative graph query algebra.


A key issue of practical and theoretical interest is the ability of our
techniques to analyse the relationship between different access patterns
which occur simultaneously in a given application. For the proposed
techniques to be adopted in industrial compilers, we must be able to
estimate performance of different access patterns and schedules
reasonably accurately, taking into account access latency, alignment and
caching effects.


The Ph.D. student will be based at Imperial College London, supervised by
Prof. Paul Kelly (http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~phjk/). The research will be
in collaboration with Codeplay Software Ltd, Edinburgh (http://www.codeplay.com),
and the Ph.D. programme will involve a 3-month industrial period working
at Codeplay's offices in Edinburgh.


--
Alastair F. Donaldson, B.Sc. (hons), Ph.D.


Codeplay Software Ltd. - http://www.codeplay.com45 York Place
Edinburgh EH1 3HP


Tel: +44 (0) 131 466 0503

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