Compiler Social - 12.02.25

Date: 12 February 2025 Time: 15:00-20:00 (2 talks followed by 3h socializing)
Location: William Gates Building, 15 JJ Thomson Ave, Cambridge CB3 0FD
Rooms: LT1 (Talks), The Street (Social)
Hosts: Emma Urquhart, Tobias Grosser

⮕ Register Here

Join us for a relaxed chat about compilers, while socializing over refreshments. Our social is open to students, academics, professional developers and really anyone interested in compilation. We welcome beginners as well as experts. Our social is an unguided space offered for you to get to know people, try out some new ideas, get feedback on your code, or pair-program on a difficult program. Come with just a paper notebook or bring your laptop to hack on some in-progress patches.

This social is traditionally organized by the LLVM community, but is open to all (potential) compiler enthusiasts. For the first time, the next Compiler Social Talk is part of the department's Wednesday Seminar.

Hardware Datapath: For Machine Learning and Beyond - George Constantinides

We will explore a couple of topics of recent interest to me: how to best bridge the Boolean world of hardware design with the continuous world of modern machine learning, and how to utilise recent advances in graph rewriting for datapath optimization. The former will lead us to explore how the fundamental computational units of deep learning might be reconsidered with hardware efficiency in mind. The latter will allow us to optimize hardware for computer arithmetic, including automated (re-)discovery of well-known manual tricks, and is now in use by Intel. This talk summarises the outcomes of joint work with Marta Andronic, Peter Cheung, Sam Coward, James Davis, Theo Drane and Erwei Wang.

Bio:

George A. Constantinides received the Ph.D. degree from Imperial College London in 2001. Since 2002, he has been with the faculty at Imperial College London, where he is currently Professor of Digital Computation and Director of the Imperial Early Career Researcher Institute, having previously served as Associate Dean of Engineering and Head of Circuits and Systems. He has been TPC chair of the FPGA, FPL and FPT conferences. He currently serves on several program committees and has published over 200 research papers in peer refereed journals and international conferences. Prof Constantinides enjoys family, espresso and general geekery.

Equality Saturation in a Real-World Machine Learning Compiler - Alex Zinenko

Machine learning (ML) compilers rely on graph-level transformations to enhance the runtime performance of ML models. However, these program transformations are often driven by manually-tuned compiler heuristics, which are quickly rendered obsolete by new hardware and model architectures. Instead, we propose the use of equality saturation. We replace such heuristics with a more robust global performance model, which accounts for downstream transformations. While this approach still requires a global performance model to evaluate the profitability of transformations,it holds significant promise for increased automation and adaptability. We address challenges in applying equality saturation on real-world ML compute graphs and state-of-the-art hardware, study different cost modeling approaches to deal with fusion and layout optimization, and tackle scalability issues that arise from considering a very wide range of algebraic optimizations. Our implementation builds on and improves the XLA compilation pipeline for CPU and GPU.

Bio:

Alex is a compiler researcher working primarily on compilers for machine learning, who currently holds a leadership position in a stealth start-up company. Until early 2024, he was a part of Google DeepMind research lab working on compilers for ML and ML for compilers. He obtained his PhD from the University Paris Saclay (Paris Sud XI) for his work on “Interactive Program Restructuring”. His research interests span from compilation to high-performance systems, to interactive software visualization united for the common goal of making programming efficient programs effectively.

History

The LLVM Compiler Social Cambridge has a long history. Over the years it was by members of the LLVM community in local pubs, at Microsoft Research, Graphcore and in many other venues. Similar events are hosted in the Bay Area, Paris, Zurich, Berlin, and numerous other cities worldwide.

How to get there

Public transport

After arriving at Cambridge Railway Station, take either the U1 or U2 Universal buses towards "Girton Corner/Eddington" until "William Gates Building". Alternatively, take the X3 towards Huntingdon until "Cam Uni Vet School".

Cycling and Car

Cycling from the Railway Station to the William Gates Building takes about 20 minutes with cycling paths available for the majority of the path. Parking spaces and Bicycle racks are available in front of the building. The building is easily reachable from the M11.