The Stanford Software Research Lunch is a weekly event on Thursday where students and researchers present their latest work to peers. Talks are open to anybody, but regular attendees are expected to give a presentation on their work.
Mailing list: software-research-lunch@lists.stanford.edu (subscribe via mailman)
Calendar: ical
Format: The lunch is held every week during fall, winter and spring quarter. The first week of every quarter is an organizational lunch where people can sign up to give a talk. If you'd like to give a talk, please contact Rohan Yadav.
Past quarters: Fall 2023, Spring 2023, Winter 2023, Fall 2022, Winter 2021, Fall 2020, Winter 2020, Fall 2019, Spring 2019, Winter 2019, Fall 2018, Spring 2018, Winter 2018, Fall 2017, Spring 2017, Winter 2017, Fall 2016.
Ordering Food: For suggestions for those ordering food for the lunch, see here.
1/9: Organizational Lunch
Time: Thursday, January 9, 2025, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: Gates 415
Organizational lunch. Come sign up to give a talk during the quarter.
Food:
1/16: Cypress: Task-Based Tensor Computations on Modern GPUs
Time: Thursday, January 16, 2025, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: Gates 415
Speaker: Rohan Yadav
Abstract: Domain-specific, fixed-function units are becoming increasingly common in modern processors. As the computational demands of applications evolve, the capabilities and interfaces of these fixed-function units continue to change. NVIDIA’s latest Hopper GPU architecture contains multiple fixed-function units per compute unit, including an asynchronous data movement unit and an asynchronous matrix multiplication unit. Efficiently utilizing these units requires a fundamentally different programming style than previous architectures, where programmers must develop complex warp-specialized kernels that orchestrate producer- consumer pipelines between the asynchronous units. To manage the complexity of programming these new architectures, we introduce Cypress, a task-based programming model with sequential semantics. Cypress programs are a set of designated functions called tasks that operate on tensors, and are free of communication and synchronization. Cypress programs are bound to the target machine through a mapping specification that describes where tasks should run and in which memories tensors should be materialized. We present a compiler architecture that lowers Cypress programs into CUDA programs that perform competitively with expert-written codes. Cypress achieves 0.88x-1.06x the performance of cuBLAS on GEMM, and between 0.80x-0.98x the performance of the currently best-known Flash Attention implementation while eliminating all aspects of explicit data movement and asynchronous computation from application code.
Food:
1/23: Efficient Optimization with Encoded Ising Models
Time: Thursday, January 23, 2025, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: Gates 415
Speaker: Devrath Iyer
Abstract: Many promising computing substrates, including quantum computers, oscillator-based computers, and P-computers, solve constrained combinatorial optimization problems by minimizing energy functions called Ising models. Because Ising solvers explore an unconstrained search space, Ising models for many popular optimization problems must include penalty terms to raise the energy of infeasible solutions that would appear optimal otherwise. We observe that for some problems, Ising solvers spend the majority of computation time exploring this invalid state and often never find a feasible solution. We introduce the Encoded Ising Model (E-I model), an extension to the Ising Model that uses a digital encoding circuit to vastly reduce the proportion of time a solver spends exploring invalid state. We present FUSE, a software framework that enables the description of such functions and automatically lowers them to a P-computer. Our formulation reduces the number of iterations to a solution by a factor of 7.2-52000x and achieves up to 100.0% higher estimated success probability over baseline formulations.
Food:
1/30: TBD
Time: Thursday, January 30, 2025, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: Gates 415
Speaker: Shiv Sundram
Abstract: TBD
Food:
2/6: TBD
Time: Thursday, February 6, 2025, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: Gates 415
Speaker: TBD
Abstract: TBD
Food:
2/13: TBD
Time: Thursday, February 13, 2025, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: Gates 415
Speaker: TBD
Abstract: TBD
Food:
2/20: TBD
Time: Thursday, February 20, 2025, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: Gates 415
Speaker: TBD
Abstract: TBD
Food:
2/27: TBD
Time: Thursday, February 27, 2025, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: Gates 415
Speaker: TBD
Abstract: TBD
Food:
3/6: TBD
Time: Thursday, March 6, 2025, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: Gates 415
Speaker: Yuka Ikarashi
Abstract: TBD
Food:
3/13: TBD
Time: Thursday, March 13, 2025, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: Gates 415
Speaker: TBD
Abstract: TBD
Food:
3/20: TBD
Time: Thursday, March 20, 2025, 12 noon - 1pm
Location: Gates 415
Speaker: TBD
Abstract: TBD
Food: