Many parallel programs can be expressed as instances of more generic patterns of parallelism, such as pipelines, stencils, wavefronts and divide-and-conquer. Providing a skeleton API simplifies programming: the programmer only has to write code which customizes selected skeletons to the application. This also makes the resulting programs more performance portable: the compiler and/or run-time can exploit structural information provided by the skeleton to choose the best implementation strategy for a range of underlying architectures, from GPU, through manycore, and on to large heterogeneous clusters.

Opportunities for research in this area include the full integration of skeletons into the language and compilation process, dynamic optimization of skeletons for diverse heterogeneous systems, the extension of skeleton approaches to applications which are not quite skeleton instances, the automatic discovery of new (and old) skeletons in existing applications, and the design and implementation of skeleton languages in domain-specific contexts.

Within the Institute for Computing Systems Architecture (ICSA), I work with the Structured Parallelism Group and the Compiler and Architecture Design Group.

I am Co-Director of the Centre for Doctoral Training in Pervasive Parallelism. I am Edinburgh PI on the EPSRC funded "Discovery" project, investigating Pattern Discovery and Program Shaping for Heterogeneous Manycore Systems, in collaboration with the University of St Andrews.

I was previously Director of ICSA, a member of the the Steering Committee of NAIS, the Centre for Numerical Algorithms and Intelligent Software, and hosted the NAIS Workshop on Skeletons, Heterogeneous Systems and Domain Specific Optimization. Previous projects include eSkel and Enhance.

Publications and Projects in the Edinburgh Research Explorer Archive

All Publications (includes some older publications not in the Edinburgh Archive above)