PL/SE Seminar - Software Developer Tools for Democratizing Heterogeneous Computing
Abstract: Emerging hardware is shaping the future of heterogeneous computing; however, the use of such extraordinary computing power is restricted to a few software developers with hardware expertise. My research designs software developer tools to democratize heterogeneous computing.
In this talk, I will introduce my recent work on automated program repair and automated test input generation for heterogeneous application development with FPGA. HeteroGen (ASPLOS'22) automatically translates C/C++ code to its high-level synthesis (HLS) version for FPGA acceleration. Key to the success of HeteroGen is adapting the idea of search-based program repair to the heterogeneous computing domain, while addressing two technical challenges. First, the turn-around time of HLS compilation and simulation is much longer than the usual C/C++ compilation and execution time. Second, behavior preservation requires testing, but test cases are often unavailable. I will then describe my work on HeteroFuzz (FSE'21), a fuzzing-based test generation tool, designed to specifically target heterogeneous applications and to detect platform-dependent divergence between CPU and FPGA. This line of research, to our knowledge, is the first attempt to expand the reach of software engineering techniques to the hardware design domain.
Bio: Qian Zhang is a postdoctoral researcher in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research reinvents software tools for emerging computing paradigms such as FPGA-based heterogeneous computing to improve developer productivity. This field of study brings together a unique combination of ideas from software engineering and hardware systems. Her postdoc work has been published at ESEC/FSE, ASPLOS, ICSE, ASE. Before UCLA, she received her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her PhD work has been published at DAC, ICCAD, DATE, TCAD. She was the recipient of the University Fellowship for Academic Excellence and the Distinguished Academic Performance Scholarship in Hong Kong. She has also been selected as one of the MIT EECS Rising Stars in 2021.
This seminar will be streaming via Zoom at the link above but requires a passcode. To obtain the passcode for this event, please see the announcements on the college email lists or contact us.