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• Oct

  3

  CS Student Seminar: Tommy McMichen

  Department of Computer Science (CS)

  12:00 PM

  EVENT DETAILS

  Tuesday 3rd October 2023
  Mudd 3514

  Speaker
  Tommy McMichen

  Title
  Breaking a Vase and Putting it Back Together: The Folly of Premature Optimization

  Abstract
  At a high level, compilers are presented with the problem of taking the description of a program and automatically translating it to execute on a given system. In this process, modern compilers are obliged to optimize the given program, improving upon the developer's description, and more efficiently utilizing available hardware resources. Fully realizing the capabilities of increasingly complex, modern computer systems entails increasingly large-scale restructuring of the program. To achieve this, compilers rely upon intermediate representations, which present the program to the compiler in a form amenable to analysis, granting powerful degrees of freedom with which it can perform said restructuring. In this talk, I will go over a brief history of compilers and the intermediate representations they employ, discuss the challenges facing today's compilers, and present my work on representing programs in a way that removes ambiguity, allowing for the analysis and optimization of general purpose data collections within a program.

  Biography
  Tommy is a 4th year Ph.D. candidate studying Computer Systems, specifically Compilers, with Prof. Simone Campanoni in the ARCANA Lab. Tommy's focus lies in intermediate program representation design, enabling new static analyses and broadening the compiler's optimization space, specifically for memory usage and layout.

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  TIME Tuesday, October 3, 2023 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

  ADD TO CALENDAR

  CONTACT Wynante R Charles    wynante.charles@northwestern.edu EMAIL

  CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)