Login
Computer Science @ Rochester
Monday, November 10, 2008
11:00 AM
Computer Studies Bldg. Room 209
Dr. Jan-Willem Maessen
Sun Microsystems Laboratories
Fortress: Parallel Programming Through Extensible Bulk Operations
The Fortress programming language (http://projectfortress.sun.com) has a number of ambitious goals aimed at making it easier for ordinary engineers, scientists, and programmers to write parallel code. In order to accomplish this goal, Fortress focuses on bulk operations on parallel data structures---an approach that is at the core of most successful models of parallel programming in widespread use. This talk will provide an overview of some of the novel features of the Fortress language: flexible mathematical syntax with bulk operations such as comprehensions and reductions, implicit parallelism, an innovative type system, and library-based implementation of language constructs. More important, it will show how all these features combine to allow programmers to extend the language with new bulk operations and new sources of parallel data.

Short bio:

Jan-Willem Maessen has been part of Project Fortress since its inception in 2002, and is presently the primary maintainer of the libraries for the Fortress programming language. He has been heavily involved in the design of the Fortress language and in its implementation, and drafted the original specifications of the parallel portions of the language. His many interests include language design, memory consistency models, concurrent algorithms, compilation, semantics, and architecture.

Prior to joining Sun, Jan developed Eager Haskell, a Haskell implementation that executes programs using resource-bounded eager evaluation rather than lazy evaluation. He also contributed heavily to the compiler and libraries for pH, an implicitly-parallel programming language based on Haskell.

Refreshment will be provided at 10:45 AM