10/9/2024 Bruce Adams
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign CS professor Charith Mendis received a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award beginning September 1, 2024. His research consists of adapting compilers to deal with the increasing diversity of computing devices.
Written by Bruce Adams
Illinois Grainger College of Engineering Siebel School of Computing and Data Science professor Charith Mendis received a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award beginning September 1, 2024.
Mendis reacted to the announcement by saying, “I was very happy because this is an area that I'm passionate about. I wrote the proposal and was very happy to hear it would be funded. We can continue to do the research, which I love.” That research consists of adapting compilers to deal with the increasing diversity of computing devices. Compilers need to catch up in their support for rapidly changing hardware.
With the rapid pace of workload and hardware evolutions, heterogeneous computing devices are getting even more diverse. However, compilers have historically lagged in support for novel hardware and their responsiveness to hardware and workload innovations. Mendis and his research team propose to build an adaptive compiler targeting heterogeneous platforms so that programmers can use existing domain-specific languages (DSL) to express computations without needing to learn new languages.
HAPPS (Heterogeneous Architecture Parametric Programming System) will employ novel program representations and machine learning-based schemes that can adapt to rapid hardware changes.
Mendis is the sole PI on the HAPPS project, joined by graduate research students. Mendis’ lab at the Thomas M. Siebel Center for Computer Science has multiple A100 GPUs and access to other cloud computing resources to collect data and train the machine learning models. The project is funded with $500,000 in its first two years. Mendis says, “Some of the students will be working on this project. And they are already producing preliminary results. I'm happy with the progress so far, and hopefully, we can publish things soon.”
The Young Faculty Award (YFA) program aims to identify and engage rising stars in junior research positions in academia and non-profit research institutions to expose them to Department of Defense (DoD) needs and DARPA’s program development process. The YFA program provides high-impact funding to elite researchers early in their careers to develop innovative new research that enables transformative DoD capabilities. Ultimately, the YFA program will develop the next generations of researchers who will focus a significant portion of their careers on DoD and National Security issues.
YFA grants are for 24 months. Each YFA awardee has a Project Manager Mentor with closely aligned research interests. Mendis’s mentor is Dr. Howard Shrobe. Shrobe’s research interests are developing, executing, and transitioning programs in computing systems, cyber security, and artificial intelligence (AI).
Grainger Engineering Affiliations
Charith Mendis is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor of computer science and is affiliated with the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science and Coordinated Science Laboratory.