Galois Tech Talk: GpuGen: Bringing the Power of GPUs into the Haskell World
Don Stewart
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Title: GpuGen: Bringing the Power of GPUs into the Haskell World
Speaker: Sean Lee
Programming Languages & Systems
UNSW, Sydney
Date: Tuesday, September 2nd.
10.30am
Location: Galois, Inc.
421 SW 6th Ave. Suite 300
(3rd floor of the Commonwealth Building)
Portland, Oregon
Abstract:
For the last decade, the performance of GPUs has out-grown CPUs, and
their programmability has also improved to the level where they can be
used fo general-purpose computations. Nonetheless, GPU programming is
still limited only to those who understand the hardware architecture and
the parallel processing. This is because the current GPU programming
systems are based on the specialized parallel processing model, and
require low-level attention in many aspects such as thread launching
and synchronization.
The need for a programming system which provides a high-level
abstraction layer on top of the GPU programming systems without losing
the performance gain arises to facilitate the use of GPUs. Instead of
writing a programming system from the scratch, the development of a
Haskell extension has been chosen as the ideal approach, since the
Haskell community has already accumulated a significant amount of
research and resources for Nested Data Parallelism, which could be
adopted to provide a high-level abstraction on GPU programming and even
to broaden the applicability of GPU programming. In addition, the
Foreign Function Interface of Haskell is sufficient to be the
communication medium to the GPU.
GpuGen is what connects these two dots: GPUs and Haskell. It compiles
the collective data operations such as scan, fold, map, etc, which
incur most computation cost, to the GPU. The design of the system, the
structure of the GpuGen compiler, and the current development status are
to be discussed in the talk.
Biographical details:
Sean Lee is a PhD candidate at the UNSW, Sydney, working
in the Programming Languages & Systems Group. This summer
he's been interning at Nvidia in Santa Clara, working on
programming GPUs with Haskell.
About the Galois Tech Talks.
Galois (http://galois.com) has been holding weekly technical
seminars for several years on topics from functional programming,
formal methods, compiler and language design, to cryptography, and
operating system construction, with talks by many figures from the
programming language and formal methods communities.
The talks are open and free. If you're planning to attend, dropping
a note to <do...@galois.com> is appreciated, but not required.
If you're interested in giving a talk, we're always looking for new
speakers.
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