Title: Stream Programming : Parallel Processing Made Simple

Abstract: Semiconductor and processor scaling is leading us toward processor chips with 10s to 100s of "cores" and distributed on-chip memories. Parallelism can take advantage of the plentiful and inexpensive arithmetic units made possible by modern VLSI technology. However, without locality, bandwidth quickly becomes a bottleneck.

Communication bandwidth, not arithmetic is the critical resource in a modern computing system that dominates cost, performance, and power. Stream programming simplifies the exploitation of both parallelism and locality. A stream program naturally exposes parallelism across stream elements and kernels. Locality is also exposed - both within and between kernels. At a lower level, simplifying the communication involved in supplying instructions and data to individual cores gives orders of magnitude improvements in efficiency. This talk will discuss exploitation of parallelism and locality using stream processing with examples drawn from the Imagine, Merrimac, and ELM projects and from three generations of stream programming systems

Bio: Bill Dally is the Willard R. and Inez Kerr Bell Professor of Engineering and the Chairman of the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University. Bill is also co-founder, Chairman, and Chief Scientist of Stream Processors, Inc. Bill and his group have developed system architecture, network architecture, signaling, routing, and synchronization technology that can be found in most large parallel computers today. While at Bell Labs Bill contributed to the BELLMAC32 microprocessor and designed the MARS hardware accelerator. At Caltech he designed the MOSSIM Simulation Engine and the Torus Routing Chip which pioneered wormhole routing and virtual-channel flow control. While a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology his group built the J-Machine and the M-Machine, experimental parallel computer systems that pioneered the separation of mechanisms from programming models and demonstrated very low overhead synchronization and communication mechanisms. At Stanford University his group has developed the Imagine processor, which introduced the concepts of stream processing and partitioned register organizations. Bill has worked with Cray Research and Intel to incorporate many of these innovations in commercial parallel computers, with Avici Systems to incorporate this technology into Internet routers, co-founded Velio Communications to commercialize high-speed signaling technology, and co-founded Stream Processors, Inc. to commercialize stream processor technology. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the ACM, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received numerous honors including the IEEE Seymour Cray Award and the ACM Maurice Wilkes award. He currently leads projects on computer architecture, network architecture, and programming systems. He has published over 200 papers in these areas, holds over 50 issued patents, and is an author of the textbooks, Digital Systems Engineering and Principles and Practices of Interconnection Networks.