Future Technologies Colloquium Series

ABSTRACT:

I will present Sequoia, a programming language designed to enable programmers to develop portable, high-performance applications. Sequoia�s design is centered around the observation that high performance programs are bandwidth efficient, and careful choreographing of data movement throughout the machine is key to application performance. By abstractly exposing hierarchical memory in the programming model, and by providing mechanisms to localize computation to particular memory locations in the machine, Sequoia encourages the development of programs that are bandwidth efficient yet remain portable across machines with different memory hierarchy designs. I will discuss our current results on a cluster of PCs and a 2 processor Cell blade, talk a little about near-term release plans for Sequoia, and finish up with future machine targets and research plans.