[Pl-seminar] PL seminar schedule

[Aaron Turon]

NEU Programming Languages Seminar presents

Sorin Lerner
University of California, San Diego

Wednesday, 9/15

11:45am - 1:30pm
Room 366 WVH (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/wand/directions.html)

Strategies for Building Correct Optimizations

Program analyses and optimizations are at the core of many optimizing
compilers, and their correctness in this setting is critically
important because it affects the correctness of any code that is
compiled. However, designing correct analyses and optimizations is
difficult, error prone and time consuming. This talk will present
several inter-related approaches for building correct analyses and
optimizations. I will start with an approach based on a
domain-specific language for expressing optimizations, combined with a
checker for verifying the correctness of optimizations written in this
language. This first approach still requires the programmer to write
down the optimizations in full detail. I will then move on to several
techniques which instead attempt to synthesize correct optimizations
from a higher-level description. In particular, I will present an
approach that discovers correct optimization opportunities by
exploring the application of equality axioms on the program being
optimized. Finally, I will present a technique that synthesizes
generally applicable and correct optimization rules from concrete
examples of code before and after some transformations have been
performed.

Bio

Sorin Lerner is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer
Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. He
received his PhD in 2006 from the University of Washington, under the
supervision of Craig Chambers. Before that, he received an
undergraduate degree in Computer Engineering from McGill University,
Montreal. His research interests lie in programming language and
analysis techniques for making software systems easier to write,
maintain and understand, including static program analysis, domain
specific languages, compilation, formal methods and automated theorem
proving. Lerner works actively at the interface of Programming
Languages and Software Engineering, and frequently publishes at
POPL/PLDI and ICSE/FSE. Sorin Lerner was the co-chair of the 2010 ACM
SIGPLAN-SIGSOFT PASTE workshop, and is the recipient of an NSF Career
Award (2007), and of the 2003 PLDI Best paper award.