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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 investigates the scientific foundation of computer memory, focusing on locality theory and optimization. These principles are used to program hardware and software caches to reduce data movement, which is the key bottleneck limiting the performance and power efficiency of modern systems, including handheld devices, GPUs, and 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, with fast memory dynamically managed (often as caches) and shared. The field of locality research focuses on analyzing and optimizing the memory hierarchy. Locality research addresses the following three challenges:
Our work in locality theory (see papers listed below) has demonstrated that the measures of data movement, data reuse, and working set are mathematically interconnected and can be converted into one another. These are not distinct phenomena but rather different manifestations of the same underlying principle.
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 links The FastCode Seminar
Locality Theory 101 -- The Foundation of Fast Code
(video) I gave in December 2025. 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 )