Ed Lambda meetup: Tuesday 10th July, about "Single Assignment C"

[Rob Stewart]

Hi,

I'm delighted to announce our talk for the Ed Lambda July

meetup. Sven-Bodo Sholz will be talking about the SAC programming

language, of which he is the co-designer.

When: Tuesday, 10th July, 7pm

What is SAC? According to wikipedia.... "SAC (Single Assignment C) is

a strict purely functional programming language which design is

focused on the needs of numerical applications. Emphasis is laid on

efficient support for array processing." [1]

Ed Lambda talk....

Title: Aiming for HP3: High-Productivity, High-Performance, and

High-Portability

Abstract

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As a starting point for discussion, I will present SaC

and its auto-sequentialising compiler toolchain. I will present some

of the underlying design choices that were guided by the desire to

offer programmers with a high-level of programming productivity. Being

based on C syntax, SaC offers a completely hardware agnostic

programming model with n-dimensional array structures at its

heart. This enables abstractions similar to what is available in

Matlab. In contrast to Matlab, the toolchain of SaC was always aimed

at compilation for high-performance executions. We have employed

functional principles in order to facilitate radical program

transformations that enable our toolchain to transform

algorithm-friendly, hardware-agnostic programs into highly optimised,

target-hardware-specific form. For several examples from computational

science and from computer vision, we could demonstrate very

competitive runtimes on a range of architectures including traditional

SMPs and GPGPUs. This performance can be obtained without any manual

program adjustments despite the vast differences in the target

architectures, making code portability a matter of a compiler switch.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAC_programming_language