Red Hat Colloquium: “Software-Configured Compute Environments”, Ulrich Drepper (Red Hat)

Wednesday, November 14th, 2018, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
refreshments & networking at 11:30 AM
Hariri Institute for Computing
111 Cummington Mall, Room 180

Ulrich Drepper
Engineer, Office of the CTO at Red Hat

Software-Configured Compute Environments

Abstract: Hardware and software environments are designed as a compromise between many different requirements. This sacrifices performance, among other aspects, while at the same time the need for compute increases.

Specialists can certainly create more optimized systems. The challenge is to automate this.

To research these new systems, hardware specialists need to create re-configurable processors, compiler writers to deduce the best architecture from source code and generate configurations for hardware and OS, improved OSes to efficiently run that code. All that while preserving API and ideally ABI compatibility. First steps toward this are already on the way in the BU/Red Hat collaboration with the OpenShell project to utilize FPGAs as a suitable platform and the Linux-based unikernel project to optimize the runtime environment.

Bio: Ulrich Drepper joined Red Hat again in 2017, after a seven year hiatus when he worked for Goldmann Sachs. He is part of the office of the CTO and concentrates on technologies for machine learning and high- performance computing. His main interests are in the areas of low-level technologies like machine and processor architectures, programming language, compilers, high-performance and low-latency computing. In addition he is interested in using statistics and machine learning for performance analysis of programs and security of application and OS environments. Ulrich received his Diploma in Informatics from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany.