Distinguished Lecture: Legion: Programming Heterogeneous, Distributed Parallel Machines

Programmers tend to think of parallel programming as a problem of dividing computation, but often the most difficult part is the placement and movement of data. As machines become more complex and hierarchical, describing what they do with the data is increasingly a fist-class programming concern. Legion is a programming model and runtime system for describing hierarchical organizations of both data and computation at an abstract level. A separate mapping interface allows programmers to control how much data and computations are placed onto the actual memories and processors of a specific machine. This talk will present the design of Legion, the novel issues that arise in both the design and implementation, and experience with applications.

Alex Aiken is the Alcatel-Lucent Professor of Computer Science at Stanford. Alex received his Bachelors degree in Computer Science and Music from Bowling Green State University in 1983 and his PhD from Cornell University in 1988. Alex was a Research Staff Member at the IBM Almaden Research Center (1988-1993) and a Professor in the EECS departmen at UC Berkeley (1993-20030 before joining the Stanford faculty in 2003. His research interest is in areas related to programming languages. He is an ACM Fellow, a recipient of Phi Beta Kappa's Teaching Award, and a former chair of the Stanford Computer Science Department (2014-2018).