Talk on "Compilation for distributed systems"
Speaker: Dr. Unnikrishnan C (Research Fellow, SUTD, Singapore).
Title: Compilation for distributed systems
Abstract:Graphs model relationships across real-world entities in web graphs, social network graphs, and road network graphs. Graph algorithms are irregular, i.e memory access patterns varies with each graph object. Graph algorithms analyze and transform a graph object to discover graph properties or to apply a computation. For instance a community detection algorithm discovers likely communities in a social network. In Domains such as social information systems, the number of edges can be in billions or trillions.
Graph algorithms can be executed on multi-core CPUs, GPUs with thousands of cores, multi-GPU devices, and CPU+GPU clusters, depending on the size of the graph object. Inorder to program such algorithms on heterogeneous targets, a programmer is required to deal with parallelism and also manage explicit data communication between distributed devices. This implies that a programmer is required to learn CUDA, OpenMP, MPI, etc. and also the details of the hardware architecture. Such codes are error prone and difficult to debug.
The talk will focus on, Falcon, a graph Domain Specific Language ( DSL) for data analytics on graph, and its compiler. The compiler is developed as part of the PhD work of Dr.Unnikrishnan C. Falcon programs are explicitly parallel and Falcon hides all the hardware and communication details from a programmer. Falcon support distributed systems with CPU and GPU. Another feature of Falcon is that it supports mutation of graph objects and thus enables programming dynamic graph algorithms. In Falcon a programmer needs to focus only on the algorithmic logic, making it easy to program and hence increase productivity.
Speaker Bio: Dr. Unnikrishnan C is a Research Fellow at Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), Singapore. He obtained PhD from IISc in 2018. He has a teaching experience of around five years. His interests are in Compilers and Programming Languages.
Event Date: 20th March, 2019(Wednesday)
Event Time: 03:30 PM to 04:30 PM
Venue: Room 23
IIT Dharwad, Karnataka