Computer Studies Bldg. Room 209
Dr. Jan-Willem Maessen
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