[Colloq] Hiring Visit: Yannis Smaragdakis

[Patricia Freeman]

Yannis Smaragdakis will be joining us for a Hiring Visit TOMORROW, 4/11.


Program Generation and Programming Models for Distributed Computing
Yannis Smaragdakis
April 11, 2008
10:30am  WVH 366

This talk first examines distributed computing from a programming model/software engineering standpoint, and subsequently uses the distributed programming domain to motivate program generation: a general and powerful approach to automating programming tasks.

We begin with a simple-to-state but important problem: how to define middleware that allows the programmer to think of a distributed application largely as a centralized one, while maintaining efficiency and expressiveness. Our NRMI middleware facility is the first to support call-by-copy-restore semantics for arbitrary pointer-based data, letting the programmer think of a remote procedure call much like a local one in many useful cases. We show that NRMI is significantly easier to use than traditional RPC middleware, yet maintains efficiency and full programmer control.

We then discuss the use of program generation techniques in the distributed computing domain. We briefly present our J-Orchestra system for automatically enabling Java programs to execute in a distributed setting. The transformations used in J-Orchestra have motivated recent general-purpose programming language work ("morphing" in the MJ language) and have inspired similar transformations with significant impact in a large open-source project (JBoss).