CGrADS Site Visit Participant - Vivek Sarkar

Professional Preparation

Biography:

Dr. Vivek Sarkar is a Research Staff Member and Senior Manager of the Programming Technologies department at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. Vivek joined IBM in 1987, after obtaining a Ph.D. from Stanford University. His dissertation addressed the problem of automatic profile-directed partitioning and scheduling parallel programs, with a prototype implementation for programs written in an applicative language called Sisal.

Vivek's first project at IBM during 1987 to 1990 was the PTRAN research project, where he worked with the other project members on developing new compiler technologies for automatic parallelization. Vivek's research results in this period included new algorithms for profile-directed partitioning of program dependence graphs into parallel tasks, and efficient algorithms for computing the control dependence relation.

From 1991 to 1993, Vivek led a product development effort for building a new high-level optimizer (called ASTI) for uniprocessor and multiprocessor systems. This optimizer includes loop and data transformations for enhancing locality and parallelism, and has been shipped in the IBM XL Fortran product compilers since 1996. Vivek's research results in this period included a new framework for integrating loop transformations, and several new algorithms for selecting various loop and data transformations.

During 1994 to 1996, Vivek was manager of the ADTI (Application Development Technology Institute) department, with the mission of transferring high-priority programming technologies and tools from the research stage into IBM products. The ADTI projects initiated during this period included include automatic shared-memory parallelization, retargetable optimizing back-ends, C++ optimizations, object-oriented analysis and design tools, and debuggers for distributed client-server and database applications.

From 1996 to 1997, Vivek was on leave from IBM as a Visiting Associate Professor in the EECS department at MIT, where he taught the compilers class and did basic research on Array SSA form, Linear Scan register allocation and other compiler optimization topics.

During 1998 to 2000, Vivek led the Jalapeno optimizing compiler group at IBM Watson in building a new dynamic optimizing compiler for Java.

Vivek currently manages the Programming Technologies department which includes projects in the areas of dynamic compilation and adaptive optimization, high-performance Java virtual machines, component verification, debugging of multithreaded programs, software configuration management, and XML technologies for database applications. Vivek has been a member of the IBM Academy of Technology since 1995.

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