Woods Library, Canandaigua (October 2011, thanks to Peter Keng)
2004 Portrait by Yawen Ding |
Chen
Ding Email: cding@cs.rochester.edu |
Short Bio
Chen Ding's research focuses on the scientific foundation of computer memory, in particular, locality theory and optimization and their use in programming with hardware or software cache systems to minimize data movement which is the main bottleneck limiting the performance and power efficiency of modern systems from handhelds to GPUs to supercomputers. His work received the NSF CAREER award (2003) and the inaugural Young Investigator Award from DOE (2002). He was a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research and a Visiting Associate Professor at MIT EECS (2007). He teaches compilers, programming languages, parallel and distributed systems, collaborative software design, logic foundations, and computer organization.
Computer memory is not uniform but hierarchical, and the fast memory is dynamically managed (often as caches) and shared. The field of locality research is concerned with the analysis and optimization of the memory hierarchy. It is most often used to solve the following three problems:
Our work in locality theory (see papers listed below) has shown that the measures of data movement, data reuse, and working set are mathematically related and can be mutually converted. They are not different phenomena but manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon.
Locality theory
Parallel program locality [PACT'24, ISMM'18, PPOPP'17]
Data movement complexity (DMC) [ICS'22, HIPS'21, CnC'21], monotonicity and worst case [MEMSYS'25a]
Relational theory of locality (RTL), aka, a higher order theory of locality (HOTL) [ISMM'21, TACO'19, TOS'18, ATC'16, JCST'14, tool download, ASPLOS'13 (slides), MSPC'12]
Reference affinity [CPM'21, POPL'06, PLDI'04]
Programmable caches
Lease cache [MEMSYS'25b, MEMSYS'24a, TACO'23, MEMSYS'23, LCTES'22, MEMSYS'20]
Optimal cache programming [TACO'22]
Collaborative caching [ISMM'12, ISMM'11, LCPC'08]
Cache hints [ISMM'13]
CPU/GPU cache modeling
Benchmarking [MEMSYS'24b, MEMSYS'18]
Symmetric locality [MEMO'24]
Multi-level cache exclusivity [TACO'17]
Associativity, granularity, sub-block cache [MEMSYS'16]
Cache sharing
Program symbiosis in cache [CCGrid'15, CCGrid'12a, PACT'11,PPOPP'11]
Optimal cache partition sharing [IJPP'17, ICPP'15]
Peer-aware optimization: code [ICPP'14], data [CGO'13 (slides), Bao dissertation ]
Key-value memory caching
Continuous-time modeling of Zipfian Workloads [TOMPECS'25]
Locality-aware memory allocation (LAMA) [TC'17, ATC'15]
Write locality and optimization
Write locality theory and measurement [MEMSYS'21, IPDPS'17, MEMSYS'16]
Reducing persistent memory writebacks [IPDPS'17]
Program locality and optimization
Code layout [CC'19, CC'18]
Compiler optimization: global cache reuse [ICS'05, JPDC'04, IPDPS'01, IPDPS'00, LCPC'99], dynamic cache reuse [MSP'02, PLDI'99]
A component model of spatial locality [ISMM'09]
Locality phase hierarchy [JPDC'07, ExpCS'07, MSP'05, ASPLOS'04, LCPC'04]
Hardness of data packing [POPL'16 by my student Lavaee]
Memory management A higher order theory of memory demand (HOTM) [ISMM'16 (Li et al.), ISMM'14] Parallel memory allocation [ISMM'19] Resource-based memory management [ISMM'11b, ISMM'06], adapted as Poor Richard's memory manager in Haskell Parallel programming BOP:
Parallel programming by hints [OOPSLA'11,PPoPP'11 poster,TR952,TR948, PPoPP'10 poster, PLDI'07] GPU race checking [TACO'17] Message passing support: Delta send/recv [CCGrid'12b], Multiphysics AMR [CoRR'11] FastTrack: Suggestible program optimization [CGO'09] Other studies [ICPP'04, PACT'04, SC'04, EuroPar'97, HICSS'96] Related link Reuse distance based
SLO (suggestions of locality optimizations) tool
by Kristof Beyls and Eric D'Hollander.
See roclocality.org (posts tagged
teaching and course number) for course
web pages with basic information and learn.rochester.edu for
course content including announcements, handouts, and assignments.Teaching ( previously taught courses )