Optimus Prime

Application have closed for the PLASMA summer internship.

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 01:53:46 -0700

We may have to interview and will inform candidate accordingly. We will be making a decision over the next week.

Summer Internship with PLASMA

Tue, 10 May 2011 12:58:00 -0700

Apparently LSCITS has money set aside to fund a few summer internships mentored by the postgraduate researchers. As a man of many ideas but little time, seems like a good opportunity to get some things implemented.

I have one concrete proposal, outlined below. Feel free to suggest your own ideas too, as long as they’re within my field of interest.

Interns will be paid at a rate of £250 per week. You will likely be invited to present your results at the next LSCITS Symposium, to be held in London during the first week of November.

An F-lite to MicroBlaze compiler

When discussing the Reduceron’s performance, we tend to compare it to the execution of the equivalent program compiled in GHC on an x86 architecture. This isn’t entirely fair given that x86 exists in fixed silicon and clocks several times higher than the Reduceron’s FPGA implementation.

A better comparison may be to something like the MicroBlaze Soft Processor, a traditional processor architecture implemented on a Xilinx FPGA. In order to make this comparison, a compiler from F-lite to MicroBlaze instructions is required.

There are a number of possible approaches;

Using the LLVM intermediate language and tool chain. It can target MicroBlaze baremetal and has been used very effectively in the latest versions of GHC.
Find ways to execute GHC compiled code, baremetal, on MicroBlaze.
Update and optimise the F-lite to C compiler.
Using similar functional language to C compiler.

Time estimate: 7 – 8 weeks. Recommend familiarity or even just a passing interest in functional programming, functional language implementations and/or low-level programming. Experience with MicroBlaze architecture is a bonus.

Application

If you are interested and are planning to spend the summer in York, please e-mail me at firstname@cs.york.ac.uk by the Tuesday Week 6, 31st May.

I would like to know;

Your thoughts on the project and how you would approach it.
What related experience you have either academically (CGO, FUN, EDI, EMS, e.t.c.) or in other work.
What dates you plan to be available to work.

Depending on a multitude of variables, I may arrange for you to come in and have a further chat.

Eligibility

Applicants must;

be a “middle years” student. i.e. 2nd to 3rd year or 3rd to 4th year.
satisfy the EPSRC’s residency rules.

More information on eligibility can be found at;

Other LSCITS interships

I’m not the only one offering an LSCITS internship.

Louis Rose is offering an “Enterprise Systems Internship: Hone your programming and research skills by developing simulations for the cloud.” Find out more at http://www.louismrose.me.uk/internship

Example	Original	SC	Inc.	TSC	Inc.	TSC to SC
Adjoxo	41,435,314	28,793,609	-30.5%	28,113,327	-32.2%	-2.4%
Cichelli	64,584,466	63,993,016	-0.9%	63,992,793	-0.9%	-0.0%
Clausify	17,798,835	18,037,031	+1.3%	14,563,929	-18.2%	-19.3%
Countdown	1,457,156,815	1,321,339,185	-9.3%	1,299,369,362	-10.8%	-1.7%
Fib	1,032	1,002	-2.9%	1,002	-2.9%	+0.0%
MSS	28,941,170	28,941,152	-0.0%	28,986,598	+0.2%	+0.2%
Mate	702,500,155	719,754,030	+2.4%	652,355,558	-7.1%	-9.4%
OrdList	30,375,282	28,702,618	-5.5%	24,914,329	-18.0%	-13.2%
Parts	140,851	134,869	-4.2%	134,869	-4.2%	+0.0%
PermSort	14,845,234	14,845,208	-0.0%	14,603,305	-1.6%	-1.6%
Queens	16,997,052	15,094,353	-11.2%	15,794,150	-7.1%	+4.4%
Queens2	23,218,945	23,079,001	-0.6%	19,948,204	-14.1%	-13.6%
Sudoku	7,525,591	7,317,391	-2.8%	6,921,446	-8.0%	-5.4%
Taut	10,194,636	6,442,574	-36.8%	6,442,536	-36.8%	-0.0%
While	34,470,420	33,507,282	-2.8%	37,005,003	+6.8%	+9.5%

		Minimum	-36.8%		-36.8%	-19.3%
		Maximum	+2.4%		+6.8%	+9.5%
		Mean	-6.9%		-10.3%	-3.5%

Using my own inlining and own simplifications
A very basic heuristic for TSC

	Reduceron Emulator Ticks (with -i1)
	Unsupercompiled		Supercompiled		Relative
Example	No PRS	With PRS	No PRS	With PRS	No PRS	With PRS
sumDouble (foldl)	310,042	210,032	260,018	60,011	0.84	0.29
sumSquares (foldl)	83,943	42,734	83,223	42,734	0.99	1.00

Optimus Prime

Application have closed for the PLASMA summer internship.

Summer Internship with PLASMA

An F-lite to MicroBlaze compiler

Application

Eligibility

Other LSCITS interships

Google Code Jam 2011

Building Agda inside a Capri sandbox

More heresy

Proofs in Haskell + exts + She

Update to Problem 3

Problem Number 3

VSTTE competition problem 1 completed in Agda.

Google sync issue for iPhone sends you to web dead end

My slides from Meta2010

Talk: Supercompilation and the Reduceron

Results for 12th November

sumSumEnum results

Results of early call-graph, supercompilation targetting experiments

New generation call graph

Why I have been quiet...

Why does...

Next steps

Where foldls are used instead of foldrs