COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH WEEK JANUARY 2025
Professor Lieven Eeckhout, Department of Electronics and Information Systems (ELIS), Ghent University, Belgium
Professor Prabal Dutta, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley
COM3 Level 1
Multipurposed Hall 1, 2 and 3 [COM3 01-26, 01-27 and 01-28]
This is a distinguished talk as part of the NUS Computer Science Research Week 2025 https://researchweek.comp.nus.edu.sg/
10:00 – 11:20 Is What You See What You Execute? The Challenges of Validating Compilers - Alastair F. Donaldson
Abstract: Compilers are critical pieces of software infrastructure, and it is paramount that they work reliably. However, modern optimising compilers are incredibly complex, and this complexity is a breeding ground for subtle bugs. This has led to a thriving field of research in compiler testing, with a particular focus on randomized compiler testing, also known as compiler fuzzing, whereby compilers are automatically tested using randomly generated or randomly mutated test programs.
I will give an overview of this research field, which has led to innovative solutions to several fundamental problems in software testing: the oracle problem, the test case validity problem, and the problem of test case reduction. I will delve into these problems in detail and describe various solutions in the context of compiler testing, including differential and metamorphic testing as workarounds for the oracle, approaches to creating valid-by-construction programs to get a handle on the test case validity problem, and recent advances in automated test case reduction which are essential for randomized compiler testing to be useful in practice.
In doing so I will draw on my own experience investigating techniques for randomized testing of GPU compilers, which led to me founding the GraphicsFuzz spinout company, acquired by Google in 2018, and my subsequent experience deploying compiler testing techniques in an industrial setting. I will also discuss recent work and future challenges on going beyond the testing of compilers to the testing of program analysis tools.
Bio: Alastair Donaldson is a Professor in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London where he is Director of Research and leads the Multicore Programming Group, investigating novel techniques and tool support for programming, testing and reasoning about highly parallel systems and their programming languages. He was Founder and Director of GraphicsFuzz Ltd., a start-up company specialising in metamorphic testing of graphics drivers, which was acquired by Google in 2018, after which he spent time working with Google as a software engineering and then as a Visiting Researcher. He was the recipient of the 2017 BCS Roger Needham Award and an EPSRC Early Career Fellowship and has published more than 100 articles in the fields of programming languages, formal verification, software testing and parallel programming. Alastair was previously a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond, an EPSRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and a Research Engineer at Codeplay Software Ltd. He holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow and is a Fellow of the British Computer Society.
13:00 – 14:20 Sustainable Computer System Design - Lieven Eeckhout
Abstract: Sustainability and climate change is a major challenge for our generation. In this talk I will argue that sustainable development requires a holistic approach and involves multi-perspective thinking. Applied to computing, sustainable development means that we need to consider the entire environmental impact of computing, including raw material extraction, component manufacturing, product assembly, transportation, use, repair/maintenance, and end-of-life processing (disassembly and recycling/reuse). Analyzing current trends reveals that the embodied footprint is, or will soon be, more significant compared to the operational footprint. I will present a simple, yet insightful, first-order model to assess and reason about the sustainability of computer systems in light of the inherent data uncertainty. Applying the model to a variety of case studies illustrates what computer architects and engineers can and should do to better understand the sustainability impact of computing, and to design sustainable computer systems.
Bio: Lieven Eeckhout (PhD 2002) is a Senior Full Professor at Ghent University, Belgium, in the Department of Electronics and Information Systems (ELIS). His research interests include computer architecture with a specific emphasis on performance evaluation and modeling, dynamic resource management, microarchitecture, and sustainability. He is the recipient of the 2017 ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award and the 2017 OOPSLA Most Influential Paper Award, and was elevated to IEEE Fellow in 2018 and ACM Fellow in 2021. Other awards include five IEEE Micro Top Pick selections, the MICRO 2024 Best Paper Award, the ISPASS 2013 Best Paper Award. He served as the Program Chair for ISPASS 2009, CGO 2013, HPCA 2015 and ISCA 2020, and serve(d/s) as General Chair for ISPASS 2010, IISWC 2023 and ASPLOS 2025. He previously served as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Micro (2015-2018), and as technical program committee member for 50+ computer architecture conferences.
15:00 – 16:20 From Wireless Sensors to Pervasive Perpetual Networks - Prabal Dutta
Abstract: A quarter century ago, a set of MobiCom challenge papers catalyzed a research community to pursue the vision of wirelessly networked sensors of increasingly diminishing proportions that could densely monitor the physical world. Today, much of the original vision has been realized, and a bewildering array and variety of systems have been fielded that allow us to gather and process unprecedented amounts of data about the physical world.
But this progress has also exposed many new challenges and opportunities. This talk will draw on my lab’s efforts in designing, deploying, and commercializing wireless sensors for a range of applications. The march of technology and evolution of these efforts—from seemingly trivial connected sensors with simple cloud analytics to more complex networked sensors with sophisticated sensing and communications to sustainable perceptual networks that perform multi-spectral data fusion and inference at the edge to detect complex but sparse faults—has highlighted numerous exciting directions ripe for attention from the research community.
Bio: Prabal Dutta is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at University of California, Berkeley. His interests span circuits, systems, and software, with a focus on mobile, wireless, embedded, networked, and sensing systems that have applications in health, energy, and the environment. His work has yielded dozens of hardware and software systems, has won a Test-of-Time Award (SenSys’22), five Top Pick/Best Paper Awards (MICRO’16, SenSys'10, IPSN'10, HotEmNets'10, and IPSN'08), two Best Paper Nominees, numerous demo, design, poster, and industry contests, has been directly commercialized by a dozen companies and indirectly by many dozens more, and is on display at Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum. His work has been recognized with an Okawa Foundation Grant, a Sloan Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Popular Science Brilliant Ten Award, and an Intel Early Career Award. He has served as a program chair for MobiSys, BuildSys, SenSys, IPSN, HotMobile, ESWEEK IoT Day, HotMobile, and HotPower, as general chair for EWSN, and as a member of the DARPA ISAT Study Group. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley. He has co-founded several companies based on his research including Cubeworks, Gridware, nLine, and Vizi.