Milestones in Computer Science Distinguished Lecture Series

The Future Is Parallel: What's a Programmer to Do? Breaking Sequential Habits of Thought ( Video of the presentation ) Guy L. Steele Jr. Sun Fellow Sun Microsystems Laboratories Wednesday, March 3, 2010 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. Fuller Labs, Upper Perreault Lecture Hall Parallelism is here, now, and in our faces. It used to be just the supercomputers and servers, but now multicore chips are in desktops and laptops, and general practitioners, not just specialists, need to get used to parallel programming. The sequential algorithms and programming tricks that have served us so well for 50 years are the wrong way to think going forward. In this talk we illustrate the divide-and-conquer strategy with a small, cute, slightly surprising program that represents the necessary future approach to program structure for program portability among parallel computational environments. ______ Guy Steele is a Sun Fellow for Sun Microsystems Laboratories, working on the Programming Language Research project. His research interests include algorithms, compiler design, distributed systems, floating-point arithmetic, Fortress, functional programming, garbage collection, hardware/software codesign, high performance computing, high productivity computing, interval arithmetic, Java, Lisp, object-oriented programming, operating systems, parallel algorithms, parallel computer architectures, parallel processing, programming languages, Scheme, and supercomputer design. He received his A.B. in applied mathematics from Harvard College (1975), and his S.M. and Ph.D. in computer science and artificial intelligence from MIT (1977 and 1980). Prior to joining Sun Microsystems, he was an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie-Mellon University; a member of technical staff at Tartan Laboratories in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and a senior scientist at Thinking Machines Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He joined Sun Microsystems in 1994 as a Distinguished Engineer and was named a Sun Fellow in 2003. Please visit http://research.sun.com/people/mybio.php?uid=25706 Host: Gary Pollice Reception to follow in Fuller Labs 3^rd floor lounge. Maintained by webmaster@cs.wpi.edu Last modified: Feb 17^th, 2010

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