CSE Distinguished Lecture Speaker: Professor Guy Blelloch

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HPC Lecture: Guy Blelloch

Professor at Carnegie Mellon University

For more information please contact Dr. Richard Vuduc at richie@cc.gatech.edu

"Parallel Thinking"

Abstract:

With the advent of manycore computers on every desktop and the recent access by just about anyone to massively parallel data centers, parallelism is becoming pervasive.  This trend is likely to eventually lead to a scenario in which parallel programming will become predominant and sequential programming will be a special case.  Are we ready for this change?  Short-term solutions based just on add-ons to sequential languages are unlikely to be sufficient in the long term.  Instead the change will likely require a more fundamental rethinking that permeates the programmers' methodologies from early stages of algorithm and system design.  This will require developing a form of "parallel thinking'."

Perhaps the biggest barrier to the widespread effective use of  parallelism is educating people on how to think parallel.  Many if  not most computer science classes, however, remain case studies in how to push students into thinking sequentially.  This talk will address how parallelism could be taught right from the start, and if presented at the right level of abstraction could be no harder than teaching sequential programming.

Bio:

Guy Blelloch is a Professor of Computer Science.  His research interests are in programming languages and algorithms and how they interact with an emphasis on parallel computation. He worked on one of the early Parallel Machines, the Thinking Machines Connection Machine, where he developed several of the parallel primitives for the machine.  At Carnegie Mellon Blelloch designed and implemented the parallel programming language NESL, a language designed for easily expressing and analyzing parallel algorithms.  Other more recent work on parallelism has addressed issues in scheduling, algorithm design, cache efficiency, garbage collection, and synchronization primitives.

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You are cordially invited to attend a reception in the lounge next to Klaus 1324 before the seminar to chat informally with faculty and students. Refreshments will be provided.

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