Profs. Brockman and Thain are currently recruiting multiple undergraduate students to participate in a spring project at the intersection of compilers and computer architecture. The objective is to build a software toolchain (compiler, assembler, simulator, documentation, etc) that will allow programs written in C-minor to be compiled to the albaCore computer architecture. This package will be used in future offerings of logic design to assist students in running real, complex programs on custom FPGA hardware.
Juniors or seniors who have taken either compilers or architecture (or both) are invited to apply by contacting either Prof. Thain (dthain@nd.edu) or Brockman (jbb@nd.edu). The project will be offered as a three-credit undergraduate research class in Spring 2018.
Monday, December 4, 2017
Tuesday, June 27, 2017
Talk at ScienceCloud Workshop
Prof. Thain gave the opening talk, "Seamless Scientific Computing from Laptops to Clouds", at the ScienceCloud workshop preceding High Performance Distributed Computing 2017 in Washington, DC. This talk gives an overview of the problem of migrating scientific codes from the comfortable environment of a laptop to the complex environment of a cluster or a cloud, highlighting our new tools for software deployment and resource management for bioinformatics and high energy physics applications.
Wednesday, May 31, 2017
Online Course in Data Intensive Scientific Computing
We are happy to announce the pilot of a new online short course in Data Intensive Scientific Computing. This is the equivalent of a one-credit seminar which provides an introduction to the challenges of scientific computing at large scale and the tools used to address those problems.
The course was designed to augment our summer REU program in DISC, but is also suitable for undergraduate students taking research credits, and for graduating students in all disciplines looking for an introduction to topics and tools in scientific computing.
By default, the online course is ungraded: anyone is welcome to sign up, view the lectures, take the quizzes, and follow the tutorials. If you want to receive a grade, talk to a faculty member at your institution to see if they will work with you on the material.
The course is developed by Prof. Douglas Thain and Prof. Paul Brenner, produced by the Office of Digital Learning at the University of Notre Dame, and offered through the EdX Edge platform.
You can check out a sample lecture here:
And here is an overview of the course structure:
The course was designed to augment our summer REU program in DISC, but is also suitable for undergraduate students taking research credits, and for graduating students in all disciplines looking for an introduction to topics and tools in scientific computing.
By default, the online course is ungraded: anyone is welcome to sign up, view the lectures, take the quizzes, and follow the tutorials. If you want to receive a grade, talk to a faculty member at your institution to see if they will work with you on the material.
The course is developed by Prof. Douglas Thain and Prof. Paul Brenner, produced by the Office of Digital Learning at the University of Notre Dame, and offered through the EdX Edge platform.
You can check out a sample lecture here:
And here is an overview of the course structure:
Thursday, February 2, 2017
Writing a Compilers Textbook
To my surprise, I am in the final steps of writing a textbook! You can see a sample chapter today at compilerbook.org.
The effort began in the fall of 2016, as I was putting together my materials for CSE 40243, our undergraduate class in Compilers and Language Design. This class focuses on the challenges of engineering a working language: students implement a working compiler that translates a C-like language into X86 assembly.
While there are a variety of solid textbooks that are great for a graduate course in compiler theory and optimization, none quite had the flavor I was looking for. Nearly every CS grad needs to write a parser, evaluator, or translator for some kind of little language in their career, but relatively few need to dig deeply into assembly language optimization. So, I wanted to focus on language design choices and show that simple languages are not hard to implement.
I began to combine my handwritten chalkboard notes and some sample code into a LaTeX document, and the next thing you know, I have seven chapters written. I expect to finalize everything in the spring 2017 semester.
What has made it relatively easy so far is that my compiler automatically generates many of the figures and code examples automatically, so relatively few things have to be drawn by hand. For example, this sample AST is produced automatically by the compiler emitting Graphviz DOT code from the internal representation. Neat, eh?
Following the example of Remzi and Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau with OSTEP the book will be made available for free online in PDF form, and also in an inexpensive hardcover edition printed on-demand.
Stay tuned for the release later in 2017...
The effort began in the fall of 2016, as I was putting together my materials for CSE 40243, our undergraduate class in Compilers and Language Design. This class focuses on the challenges of engineering a working language: students implement a working compiler that translates a C-like language into X86 assembly.
While there are a variety of solid textbooks that are great for a graduate course in compiler theory and optimization, none quite had the flavor I was looking for. Nearly every CS grad needs to write a parser, evaluator, or translator for some kind of little language in their career, but relatively few need to dig deeply into assembly language optimization. So, I wanted to focus on language design choices and show that simple languages are not hard to implement.
I began to combine my handwritten chalkboard notes and some sample code into a LaTeX document, and the next thing you know, I have seven chapters written. I expect to finalize everything in the spring 2017 semester.
What has made it relatively easy so far is that my compiler automatically generates many of the figures and code examples automatically, so relatively few things have to be drawn by hand. For example, this sample AST is produced automatically by the compiler emitting Graphviz DOT code from the internal representation. Neat, eh?
Following the example of Remzi and Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau with OSTEP the book will be made available for free online in PDF form, and also in an inexpensive hardcover edition printed on-demand.
Stay tuned for the release later in 2017...
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