High-performance computing, with much less code

Many companies invest heavily in hiring talent to create the high-performance library code that underpins modern artificial intelligence systems. NVIDIA, for instance, developed some of the most advanced high-performance computing (HPC) libraries, creating a competitive moat that has proven difficult for others to breach. But what if a couple of students, within a few months, could compete with state-of-the-art HPC libraries with a few hundred lines of code, instead of tens or hundreds of thousands? That’s what researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have shown with a new programming language called Exo 2. Exo 2 belongs to a new category of programming languages that MIT Professor Jonathan Ragan-Kelley calls “user-schedulable languages” (USLs). Instead of hoping that an opaque compiler will auto-generate the fastest possible code, USLs put programmers in the driver's seat, allowing them to write “schedules” that explicitly control how the ... Read full article.