PLDI Tutorials

James Noble

Grace aims to demonstrate the advantages of object-orientation, showing how a small number of underlying principles can be applied uniformly: programs built from nested objects, computation as requesting behaviour from objects, and the separation of types and classes. Grace makes it possible to write powerful libraries that extend the language, supporting first-class pattern matching, parser combinators, and flexible control structures. Grace also supports, but does not require, static type checking. This makes it possible to use Grace as a dynamically typed language, to start with dynamic types and add static types later, or to teach static types from the beginning. In this talk, I'll outline the principal features of Grace, discuss open issues, and listen to your reactions while some choices are still on the table. I'll give some examples from the design process so far, showing how conceptually orthogonal design decisions all too easily end up as tightly coupled gordian knots.

PLDI
Time: 10:45–12:15, June 13
Room: Conference 8

James Noble is a professor at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. James's research centres around software design.

Jaejin Lee

Open Computing Language (OpenCL) is a programming model for heterogeneous parallel computing systems. OpenCL provides a common abstraction layer across different multicore architectures, such as CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, and Cell BE processors. Programmers can write an OpenCL application once and run it on any OpenCL-compliant system. However, current OpenCL is restricted to a single operating system instance. To target heterogenous CPU/GPU clusters, programmers must use the OpenCL framework combining with a communication library, such as MPI. This tutorial will cover usages and internals of an OpenCL framework, called SnuCL. It naturally extends the original OpenCL semantics to the heterogeneous cluster environment. The target cluster contains multiple CPUs and GPUs in a node. The nodes in the cluster are connected by an interconnection network, such as Gigabit and InfiniBand switches. For such clusters, SnuCL provides an illusion of a single operating system image for the programmer. With SnuCL, OpenCL applications written for a single operating system instance with multiple OpenCL compute devices can run on the cluster without any modification. This tutorial will introduce you to OpenCL and how OpenCL applications are developed for heterogeneous computing systems.
http://aces.snu.ac.kr/~jlee/Jaejin_Lees_Home/PLDI12_tutorial.html

PLDI
Time: 13:30–16:30, June 14
Room: Conference 9

Jaejin Lee is the director of the Center for Manycore Programming and a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Seoul National University. He obtained a Ph.D. from UIUC in 1999 in the area of compilation techniques for explicitly parallel programs. His primary research focus in these days is on heterogeneous parallel programming models such as OpenCL.

Luca Mottola

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are currently regarded as a key technology towards the vision of an “Internet of Things”. The current practice in programming WSNs largely revolves around low-level programming frameworks. Such an approach is not sustainable in the long term, and is certainly not applicable when WSNs become part of a larger computing infrastructure. In this tutorial, we begin with a characterization of WSN applications to identify the fundamental requirements at stake, and describe a taxonomy of high-level WSN programming solutions providing a foundation to classify, compare, and evaluate the various approaches. We intertwine the description with live demonstrations of the technology being discussed. The tutorial is aimed at fresh students looking for interesting problems, researchers willing to gain deeper insights into WSN programming, and practitioners in search of a systematic overview on the topic.
http://www.sics.se/~luca/pldiTutorial.pdf

PLDI
Time: 13:30–16:30, June 15
Room: Conference 3

Luca Mottola is an assistant professor at Politecnico di Milano and a Senior Researcher at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science. His research interests include the design, implementation, and validation of modern distributed systems, with the current focus on Internet of Things. He was listed amongst Postscapes "Internet of Things Top 100 Thinkers" and has received the Cor Baayen Award for the most promising young researcher in computer science and applied mathematics.

Aditya Nori & Sriram Rajamani

Static analysis and testing are complementary approaches to the property checking problem. The goal of Yogi is to solve the property checking problem. One of the unique features of Yogi is that it simultaneously searches for both a test to establish that the program violates the property, and an abstraction to establish that the program satisfies the property. If the abstraction has a path that leads to the violation of the property, Yogi attempts to focus test case generation along that path. If such a test case cannot be generated, Yogi uses information from the unsatisfiable constraint from the test case generator to refine the abstraction. Thus, the construction of test cases and abstraction proceed hand-in-hand, using error traces in the abstraction to guide test case generation, and constraints from failed test-case generation attempts to guide refinement of the abstraction.
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/yogi/pldi2012.aspx

PLDI
Time: 13:30–16:30, June 16
Room: Conference 9

Aditya V. Nori is a researcher at Microsoft Research India. His research interests include program analysis and machine learning with special focus on tools for improving software reliability and programmer productivity. He received his PhD from the Indian Institute of Science.

Sriram K. Rajamani is the assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India. His research interests are in programming languages and tools. Several of his projects have influenced academia and industry, the most notable one being SLAM which is the basis for Microsoft's Static Driver Verifier. He holds a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley.