Media contact: Noelle Lemoine, communications assistant; tele: (413) 597-4277; email: Noelle.Lemoine@williams.edu
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., September 22, 2014—The National Science Foundation has awarded Williams College computer science professor Stephen Freund a four-year, $252,000 grant to study scalability-oriented optimization.
“Multicore CPUs and multiprocessors offer the promise of continued software performance improvements as the number of cores they provide increases,” explains Freund, whose research focuses on design and implementation of programming languages, verification of multithreaded programs, and programming environments. “However, performance improvements are only possible if software can be designed to effectively utilize many cores by running many tasks simultaneously. Designing systems to do that is notoriously difficult for even the most expert programmers.”
Freund’s work will develop automated ways to increase performance of programs through a process called SCORE, or scalability-oriented optimization. “SCORE will monitor programs as they run, locate scalability bottlenecks where they fail to make best use of the processing cores available to them, and transform their code or execution environment to eliminate those bottlenecks.” This is a fully automatic technique requiring no programmer intervention. “SCORE lets programmers focus exclusively on getting the logic of their program right, leaving the complex and often error-prone task of performance tuning to SCORE,” Freund says.
This research, which is in collaboration with Emery Berger at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, could enable programmers to build and deploy more efficient and scalable software systems for multicore platforms. “Furthermore, the work will have broad educational impact through the development of new teaching materials and the training of students at Williams College and University of Massachusetts, as well as software developers outside academia,” Freund says.
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Founded in 1793, Williams College is the second-oldest institution of higher learning in Massachusetts. The college’s 2,000 students are taught by a faculty noted for the quality of their teaching and research, and the achievement of academic goals includes active participation of students with faculty in their research. Students’ educational experience is enriched by the residential campus environment in Williamstown, Mass., which provides a host of opportunities for interaction with one another and with faculty beyond the classroom. Admission decisions on U.S. applicants are made regardless of a student’s financial ability, and the college provides grants and other assistance to meet the demonstrated needs of all who are admitted.