My research interests lie in the areas of programming languages, compilers and systems. Specifically, I am interested in various language features, compiler techniques and run-time system support that will be necessary to unlock the potential of emerging, complex computation platforms such as multicore processors, heterogeneous architectures, sensor networks and distributed systems.
Some of my research is supported by gifts from Intel Corporation.
I am currently involved with several projects, both with my students and with collaborators at Purdue and elsewhere (completed and dormant projects are described here.):
Automatically optimizing irregular applications
This project looks at developing frameworks to automatically analyze, transform and tune irregular applications, which operate over pointer-based data structures, to improve their locality, parallelism and performance. While irregular applications seemingly have little commonality, this project is premised on the insight that at higher levels of abstractions, there are common behaviors in irregular applications that can be exploited to develop automatic transformations to enhance performance.
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Detecting and diagnosing bugs in large-scale distributed systems
This project looks at statistical techniques to detect and diagnose bugs in large-scale distributed systems. The standard approach to such detection is to use "ground truth" profiling runs that are known to be bug free to build a model of normal behavior, and then look for deviations from that model to detect bugs. This approach breaks down at large scales for two reasons. First, developers may not have access to production-scale systems when building models, and second, it may be impossible to collect verifiably bug-free runs at large scales. The goal of this work is to infer scaling properties of a program's behavior, and use that information to build models of large-scale behavior using bug-free runs at smaller scales.