Two papers written by University of Illinois computer science professor Josep Torrellas and his PhD students have recently won awards.
The paper "SoftSig: Software-Exposed Hardware Signatures for Code Analysis and Optimization" by James Tuck, Wonsun Ahn, Luis Ceze, and Josep Torrellas, has been selected as one of the 12 papers to appear in 2008 IEEE Micro special issue "Top Picks from Computer Architecture Conferences". According to the IEEE website, "this issue collects some of this year's most significant research publications in computer architecture based on novelty and long term impact". The paper had been published in ASPLOS-2008.
The paper proposes novel processor hardware to perform program analysis during execution time. The design goes beyond existing performance monitoring counters in that it allows very fast intersections of sets of addresses. It can be used to monitor accesses to memory locations or to enable novel compiler transformations.
Another paper, "DeLorean: Recording and Deterministically Replaying Shared-Memory Multiprocessor Execution Efficiently" by Pablo Montesinos, Luis Ceze, and Josep Torrellas, has been invited to appear as a "Research Highlight" in the "Communications of the ACM" magazine. According to the ACM website, "Research Highlights provides readers with a collection of outstanding research articles, selected from the broad spectrum of computing-research conferences.... Submissions are first nominated by Editorial Board Members". The paper had been published in ISCA-2008.
The paper proposes a new multiprocessor that is able to replay the execution of a parallel program in a deterministic manner. This means that the program is re-executed with exactly the same ordering of instructions and memory accesses. This design will be very effective to debug paralllel programs.
Torrellas is engaged in research in parallel computer architecture. The papers are co-authored with his students, two of whom are now faculty at North Carolina State University (James Tuck) and University of Washington (Luis Ceze).