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Programmer Productivity in a World of Mushy Interfaces: Challenges of the Post-ISA Reality

Published:25 March 2016Publication History
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Abstract

Since 1964, we had the notion that the instruction set architecture (ISA) is a useful and fairly opaque abstraction layer between hardware and software. Software rode hardware's performance wave while remaining gloriously oblivious to hardware's growing complexity. Unfortunately, the jig is up. We still have ISAs, but the abstraction no longer offers seamless portability---parallel software needs to be tuned for different core counts, and heterogeneous processing elements (CPUs, GPUs, accelerators) further complicate programmability. We are better at building large-scale heterogeneous processors than we are at programming them. Maintaining software across multiple current platforms is difficult and porting to future platforms is also difficult. There have been many technical responses: virtual ISAs (e.g., NVIDIA's PTX), higher-level programming interfaces (e.g., CUDA or OpenCL), and late-stage compilation and platform-specific tailoring (e.g., Android ART), etc.

A team of opinionated experts, drawn from the three ASPLOS communities will examine the problem of programmer productivity in the post-ISA world, first from the perspective of their area of expertise and then noting the contributions from the other two communities. What research will save us and how? This wide-ranging debate will frame important research areas for future work while being grounded in frank discussion about what has succeeded in the past. Attendees can expect actionable insight into important research issues as well an entertaining discussion.

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        • Published in

          cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
          ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 51, Issue 4
          ASPLOS '16
          April 2016
          774 pages
          ISSN:0362-1340
          EISSN:1558-1160
          DOI:10.1145/2954679
          • Editor:
          • Andy Gill
          Issue’s Table of Contents
          • cover image ACM Conferences
            ASPLOS '16: Proceedings of the Twenty-First International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems
            March 2016
            824 pages
            ISBN:9781450340915
            DOI:10.1145/2872362
            • General Chair:
            • Tom Conte,
            • Program Chair:
            • Yuanyuan Zhou

          Copyright © 2016 Owner/Author

          Publisher

          Association for Computing Machinery

          New York, NY, United States

          Publication History

          • Published: 25 March 2016

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