Raiders of the Lost Arcs: Rediscovering dataflow computing for modern architectures

Dr. Pat Miller

DE Shaw Research in New York City

Friday, October 9, 2009
11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Fuller Labs 320

"Everything has been thought of before, but the difficulty is to think of it again." -

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Modern microprocessors are truly beginning to hit a wall -- not a Moore's Law wall, but a programmability wall! We can pack more and more transistors on a chip, but we cannot use them effectively. We can create enormous banks of RAM, but we cannot access them efficiently. We can support dozens or hundreds of threads, but we cannot manage them.

The SISAL compiler was amazing. It could transform easy to write parallel programs into very high performance, parallel, threaded, and vectorized code. Some SISAL programs even beat the performance of tuned FORTRAN and tuned assembly language programs. Hundreds of people wrote thousands of high performance programs.

The lessons learned, however, are not lost. I'll talk a little bit about the dataflow underpinnings of SISAL and a bit about the language itself. We'll then talk about how these notions developed for early shared memory vector machines like the Cray-1 map onto modern architectures like multicores, SSE, and GPU's.

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Pat Miller is computer scientist with DE Shaw Research in New York City. He spent his previous twenty years in high performance computing at Lawrence Livermore National Lab where he worked variously on high performance languages, seven years of nuclear weapon design codes, and some research into exo-scale computing. He has a Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis in computer science.

In his pursuit of an academic life while earning an industrial salary, he taught courses at UC Davis, Cal State Hayward, the University of San Francisco, and until recently was a consulting professor at Stanford. He spends his days building high performance infrastructure in C++ and Python for Anton, the fastest molecular dynamics computer in the world.

Host: Michael Gennert

Refreshments will be served.

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Last modified: September 29, 2009