SOCS General Seminar Schedule

The main engine of growth in computing power right now is the GPU, not the CPU. This talk will explain why. To enable all this new processing power to be used in software, compilers need to be written which can target GPUs. But, unlike CPUs, GPUs have whole new processing architectures released every few years, and rely extensively on graphics features and parallelism. This creates unique new challenges for compiler developers, which this talk will discuss. Codeplay targets consumer electronics, so the talk will be specifically about the real-world commercial use of GPUs and how to deliver those results to hundreds of millions of customers worldwide.

Andrew Richards is the CEO and founder of Codeplay (a GPU compiler developer for consumer electronics companies), as well as chair of the OpenCL-HLM group which is defining a new C++ higher-level GPGPU programming model. Daan Nijs is a GPU compiler developer at Codeplay

Raul will discuss the current state of compilation technology at IBM, its value for the industry and the world at large, and some of the current challenges and opportunities. He will also have a general discussion of life as a software developer at a large software corporation such at IBM, both from work/life balance and career development perspectives.

Raul Silvera is a Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM) at the IBM Canada Lab in Toronto. He's a graduate of the M.Sc. program at the School of Computer Science of McGill University. He joined IBM in 1997 and has been focused on development of compilation technology for the IBM Power and System Z platforms, including code analysis, optimization, parallelization, and code generation for C, C++, Fortran and other static languages. He has participated on many industry standard committees, including C++, OpenMP and Fortran, has led a large team of software professionals at IBM and as part of IBM has had the opportunity to make an impact on several of the largest computing sites in the world.