David I. August
Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Princeton University
Visiting Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University
Affiliated with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University
Ph.D. May 2000, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Office: Computer Science Building Room 209
Email: august@princeton.edu
Phone: (609) 258-2085
Fax: (609) 964-1699


Front Page Publication List (with stats) Curriculum Vitae (PDF) The Liberty Research Group

NOTE:

Please beware of the "Princeton University - Part-Time Research Job" scam. I am not hiring remote research assistants for the Department of Computer Science. Anyone doing so would use a campus address or phone number. Princeton students, please visit the Phish Bowl before responding to unsolicited communication.

Publications

Speculative Separation for Privatization and Reductions [abstract] (ACM DL, PDF)
Nick P. Johnson, Hanjun Kim, Prakash Prabhu, Ayal Zaks, and David I. August
Proceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), June 2012.
Accept Rate: 18% (48/255).

Automatic parallelization is a promising strategy to improve application performance in the multicore era. However, common programming practices such as the reuse of data structures introduce artificial constraints that obstruct automatic parallelization. Privatization relieves these constraints by replicating data structures, thus enabling scalable parallelization. Prior privatization schemes are limited to arrays and scalar variables because they are sensitive to the layout of dynamic data structures. This work presents Privateer, the first fully automatic privatization system to handle dynamic and recursive data structures, even in languages with unrestricted pointers. To reduce sensitivity to memory layout, Privateer speculatively separates memory objects. Privateer's lightweight runtime system validates speculative separation and speculative privatization to ensure correct parallel execution. Privateer enables automatic parallelization of general-purpose C/C++ applications, yielding a geomean whole-program speedup of 11.4 over best sequential execution on 24 cores, while non-speculative parallelization yields only 0.93.