The rise of multicore computers and clusters requires more and more programmers to do parallel programming. Their task is difficult because todays programming abstractions are low-level and error-prone, and lead to wildly varying performance on different parallel computers. We need high-level and safe abstractions that can deliver high performance on a variety of computer systems. We have such abstractions for sequential programming; why are they hard to find for parallel programming? We will discuss the problems faced by designers of parallel languages and we will examine the state of the art. Many problems remain to be solved before students can learn parallel programming just as easily as sequential programming.

About the speaker:  Jens Palsberg is a Professor and the Chair of Computer Science at UCLA, University of California, Los Angeles.

His research interests span the areas of compilers, embedded systems, programming languages, software engineering, and information security.

He is the editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions of Programming Languages and Systems, a member of the editorial board of Information and Computation, a former member of the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, and a former program chair of POPL, SAS, TACAS, and EMSOFT.