Michael O'Boyle

Michael O'Boyle graduated with a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Manchester in 1992.

Prior to moving to a lectureship at Edinburgh in 1997, he was an SERC postdoctoral research fellow, a visiting scientist at INRIA and a visiting research fellow at the University of Vienna. In 2001 he was awarded an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship and later that year, a readership in the School of Informatics. Since then he has been a visiting scholar at Stanford University and a visiting professor at UPC Barcelona. In 2006, he was awarded a Personal Chair in Computer Science. His main research interests are in auto-parallelisation, machine-learning based compilation, mapping for heterogeneous systems, and compiler/architecture co-design. He is currently the Director of the Institute for Computing Systems Architecture and the ARM research centre of excellence.

Abstract

Improving program performance using automatic tools has been the subject of research stretching back to the dawn of high level programming languages. For some, it is the perfect research topic - always room for improvement. For others, it is something that time and again fails to deliver. In this talk I will explore why compiler based code optimization has often failed to deliver. I will also look at ways we can recast compiler optimization so that it can really deliver for the many-core era.