Dr. Sven-Bodo Scholz
Dr. rer.nat. habil.
Job title: Reader
Email Address: S.Scholz@herts.ac.uk
Telephone Number: 01707286403
Memberships and Appointments: member of the ACM and SIGAPL member of the advisory board of the IFL symposia workshop chair of MicroGrid'06 general chair/ co-chair of IFL'08, AMP'10 actual program committee memberships: IFL'09, TFP'09, NPC'10
Sven-Bodo Scholz's research is driven by the desire to combine high-level program specifications with highly efficient executions on multiprocessor systems. Theoretical advances and new technologies that affect the interplay of these goals are in the focus of his research. This includes novel type systems, partial evaluation techniques, memory management techniques as well as approaches to generic programming. He has led several research projects that focused around the design and implementation of functional programming systems all of which contributed to several ready-to-use systems in the public domain.
He is a key contributor to the design and implementation of the functional array language SaC whose runtime performance competes with that of industrial Fortran compilers. The design of SaC targets various cycle-intensive computations from diverse application areas such as scientific computing, financial modeling or medical image processing. In the context of several SaC-related projects a compiler framework for SaC has been developed over the last 10 years. Its outstanding features are the advanced optimisation techniques used and the auto-parallelising capabilities for shared memory machines. These features makes SaC ideally suited for the newest trend in computer hardware: multicore / microthreaded systems. In fact, the compiler can be used without alteration to utilise the multicore machines that have just entered the mainstream processor market.
Funding Councils
Research Interests
functional programming, array programming, highly optimising and parallelising compilers, compilation towards microthreaded-architectures, stream processingTeaching specialisms
foundations of programming languages, language design, compiler construction, programming methodology, concurrent systemsCollaborations and Projects
Development of S-Net as a tool for specifying adaptive concurrent systems. This is joint work with Alex Shafarenko (UH), Clemens Grelck (University of Lübeck, Germany / UH), and several other partners from the FP6 AEther project.
Development of advanced optimisation techni ques for shape-invariant programs. This is joint work with Bob Bernecky and Tarek Abdelrahman (University of Toronto, Canada).
Compilation from SaC to μTC, a novel microthreaded architecture. This is joint work with Chris Jesshope (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands), and other partners from the FP7 Apple-CORE project.
Vectorizing SaC for modern architectures such as Sony's Cell processor or Clearspeed's CSX board. This work aims at combining the technologies from Vector Pascal and SaC and is done jointly with Paul Cockshott (Glasgow University, United Kingdom).
Type Systems and compiler technology for dynamic program adaptation takes a central role in the upcoming FP7 project ADVANCE. This is joint work with ALex Shafarenko (UH) and several other academic as well as industrial partners.