Satish Narayanasamy Receives NSF CAREER Award for work in Simplifying Parallel Programming

Satish Narayanasamy, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, has been awarded an NSF CAREER grant for his research project, “Holistic System Solutions for Empowering Parallel Programmers.”

The central vision of this project is to bring parallel programming, which continues to be a daunting task to this day even for experts, to mainstream programmers. One fundamental source of programming complexity is that the computation from different threads of a program can interleave and communicate in so many different ways, and many of them are not even intuitive to a programmer. Reasoning about all possible legal interleavings in a program and ensuring their correctness is no small challenge.

In this research project, Prof. Narayanasamy is investigating solutions that span from processors to languages to shrink the space of legal thread interleavings in a parallel program and thereby simplify the task of the programmer in ensuring correctness. Eventually, by restricting the space of legal thread interleavings of a parallel program to the behavior of its equivalent sequential program, we may be able to get the best of both worlds: sequential semantics and parallel performance. If we could get there, programming for parallel processors may become as easy as it is now for sequential processors.

Prof. Narayanasmy received his PhD from the University of California, San Diego. He joined the faculty at Michigan in 2008 and is affiliated with the Advanced Computer Architecture Lab and the Software Systems Lab in Computer Science and Engineering. His research interests are in computer architecture, parallel systems, compilers, and program analysis. He teaches Ubiquitous Parallelism (EECS 598), Parallel Computer Architecture (EECS 570), Compiler Construction (EECS 483), and Introduction to Computer Organization (EECS 370).

About the NSF CAREER Award

The CAREER grant is one of NSF’s most prestigious awards, conferred for “the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization.”