Liquid Metal: Taming Heterogeneity -Talk by Ioana Baldini, IBM

Speaker: Ioana Baldini, IBM T.J.Watson Research Center

Host: Ronald Garcia

Title: Liquid Metal: Taming Heterogeneity

Abstract:
Heterogeneous systems show considerable potential in providing high
application performance by combining conventional processors with
specialized devices such as graphical processing units (GPUs) and
reconfigurable hardware (FPGAs). The burden of extracting this
performance is usually on the application programmers, who often need
to use disparate languages and manually orchestrate application
co-execution across devices.

This talk will present an overview of the IBM Liquid Metal project,
which aims to address the difficulties that programmers face today
when developing applications for heterogeneous systems. We have
developed a programming language called Lime, with first-class
language constructs that unify several parallel programming
paradigms. The Liquid Metal toolchain compiles Lime applications to
run on a number of platforms. The Liquid Metal runtime seamlessly
manages application code co-execution and migration across devices.

Project web page: https://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_project.php?id=122

Bio:
Ioana Baldini joined IBM T.J.Watson Research Center in January 2012 as
a research staff member. She currently works on the Liquid Metal
project, which focuses on building programming solutions and runtime
systems for heterogeneous architectures. Ioana received her Bachelor
degree from Polytechnic University of Bucharest, Romania, and her
M.A.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from University of Toronto. During her
graduate studies, she spent several months interning with the research
divisions of Intel and IBM. Ioana is the recipient of an NSERC Canada
Graduate Scholarship, an IBM PhD Fellowship and the Google Anita Borg
Memorial Scholarship (Canada). Her research interests span computer
architecture, runtime systems and hardware-software interaction.