CGrADS Site Visit Participant - Linda Torczon

Professional Preparation

Linda Torczon
Computer Science
Research Scientist

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Appointments:

• Research Scientist, Department of Computer Science, Rice University, 1985 to present
• Executive Director, CRPC, Rice University, 1990 to 2000.

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Synergistic Activities

Linda Torczon's research interests include code generation, interprocedural dataflow analysis and optimization, and programming environments. In the code generation realm, she published a set of improvements to graph coloring register allocation. She is also one of the key implementors of an optimizing compiler for Fortran. In the area of interprocedural analysis and optimization, she developed techniques for interprocedural constant propagation and recompilation analysis. She also completed a study on the effectiveness of several interprocedural constant propagation techniques and collaborated on a study of the effectiveness of inline substitution. In the programming environment arena, she was one of the driving forces behind the ParaScope programming environment project at Rice. She was a principal architect of the framework for whole program analysis in the ParaScope programming environment. Techniques that she developed are widely used in industrial and research compilers.

From 1990 to 2000, Dr. Torczon served as executive director of the Center for Research on Parallel Computation (CRPC), a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center. In this capacity, she coordinated extensive research efforts, education and outreach programs, and technology transfer activities (http://www.crpc.rice.edu/CRPC). She is currently editing the CRPC Handbook of Parallel Computation, intended as a resource for computer science and application researchers, as well as for computational science and parallel computing education and training.

Dr. Torczon has been involved in activities intended to increase the number of women and underrepresented minorities entering mathematics and science related fields, particularly the field of computational science and engineering. With Ken Kennedy, she has initiated several CRPC outreach activities, including the CRPC GirlTECH program and the Girl Games effort. She has made presentations to students participating in Expanding Your Horizons, The Galveston Bay Project, and Girl Games programs that encourage middleschool girls to pursue technical careers. She has made presentations to K–12 teachers as part of GirlTECH and other Rice University programs aimed at improving mathematical and computational skills among K–12 teachers. She served on the Shared Decision Making Team of The Rice School/La Escuela Rice, a Houston Independent School District K–8 laboratory school. Finally, as tutorial chair for the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, she directed an NSF-funded tutorial program that brought faculty members from undergraduate institutions, particularly women’s colleges and institutions with large minority enrollments, to the conference and tutorials.

With Keith Cooper, Linda Torczon is co-authoring Engineering a Compiler, which is intended as a textbook for senior-level courses on compiler construction and as a resource for compiler implementors.

Dr. Torczon has served on the Program Committee for ACM SIGPLAN PLDI Conference (1994 & 2000), on the Tutorial Committee of Supercomputing 97, as Tutorial Chair of the ACM SIGPLAN PLDI Conference (1997), as Treasurer of the ACM SIGPLAN PLDI Conference (1996), on the NSF Postdoctoral Research Associates Program Panel for the ASC Division (January 1995), and on the NSF Postdoctoral Panel for the New Technologies Program of the ASC Division (February 1994).

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Related Publications:

1. “How to Build an Interference Graph,” (with K. D. Cooper and T. J. Harvey), Software-Practice and Experience, April 1998.
2. “Interprocedural Analysis and Optimization,” (with K. D. Cooper, M. W. Hall, and K. Kennedy), Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics, 48, 1996, pages 947–1003.
3. “Improvements to Graph Coloring Register Allocation,” (with P. Briggs and K. D. Cooper), ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (Toplas), 16 (1994), pp. 428–455.
4. “Interprocedural Constant Propagation: A Study of Jump Function Implementations,” (with D. Grove), Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 93 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), SIGPLAN Notices, 28 (1993), pp. 90–99.
5. “Interprocedural Optimization: Eliminating Unnecessary Recompilation,” (with M. Burke), ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (Toplas), 15 (1993), pp. 367–399.

Other Significant Publications and Patents:

1. “Compilers,” (with K.D. Cooper and K. Kennedy), article in Encyclopedia of Physical Science and Technology, 3rd Edition, Academic Press, to appear, 2001.
2. “An Efficient Representation for Sparse Sets,” (with P. Briggs), ACM Letters on Programming Languages and Systems, 2 (1993), pp. 59–69.
3. “The ParaScope Parallel Programming Environment,” (with K. D. Cooper, M. W. Hall, R. T. Hood, K. Kennedy, K. S. McKinley, J. Mellor-Crummey, and S. K. Warren), Proceedings of the IEEE, 81(2), February 1993, pp. 244–263.
4. “Rematerialization,” (with P. Briggs and K. D. Cooper), Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 92 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, SIGPLAN Notices, 27(7), July 1992, pp. 311–321.
5. “Digital Computer Register Allocation and Code Spilling Using Interference Graph Coloring,” (with P. Briggs, K. D. Cooper, and K. Kennedy), Patent Number: 5.249.295.

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Collaborators:

Current Collaborators: As executive director of both the CRPC and the Los Alamos Computer Science Institute (LACSI), I have interacted with researchers at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Caltech, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Rice University, Syracuse University, University of Houston, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Tennessee, and the University of Texas. For the sake of brevity, I have not exhaustively listed members of the CRPC or LACSI efforts. Other collaborators include: John Bennett, Bradley Broom, Keith Cooper, Rob Fowler, Tim Harvey, Ken Kennedy, John Mellor-Crummey, and Devika Subramanian (Rice); Dennis Gannon (Indiana University); Fran Berman and Andrew Chien (UCSD); Carl Kesselman (ISI, USC); Jack Dongarra and Rich Wolski (University of Tennessee); John Reynders (Sun), Kathryn McKinley (University of Massachusetts), and all of the authors and editors of the CRPC Handbook of Parallel Computation.

Thesis Advisee: Daniel Grove

Thesis Advisor: Ken Kennedy (Rice University)

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