Abstract: Thanks in large measure to Moore's Law, CPU performance has increased 40-50% per year over the past three decades. The advent of Multicore processors marks an end to sequential performance improvement and a radical shift to parallel programming. To understand the consequences of this change, it is worth looking back at where the previous, thousands-fold increase in computer performance was used and looking forward to how software might accommodate this abrupt shift in the underlying computing platform.

Bio: James Larus is Director of Software Architecture for the Data Center Futures research project in Microsoft Research.

Larus joined Microsoft Research as a Senior Researcher in 1998 to start and, for five years, lead the Software Productivity Tools (SPT) group, which developed and applied a variety of innovative techniques in static program analysis and constructed tools that found defects (bugs) in software. This group's research has both had considerable impact on the research community, as well as being shipped in Microsoft products such as the Static Driver Verifier and FX/Cop and other, widely-used internal software development tools. Subsequent, Larus was a Research Area Manager for programming languages and tools in Microsoft Research and started the Singularity research project.

Before joining Microsoft, Larus was an Assistant and Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he published approximately 60 research papers and co-led the Wisconsin Wind Tunnel (WWT) research project with Professors Mark Hill and David Wood. WWT was a DARPA and NSF-funded project investigated new approaches to simulating, building, and programming parallel shared-memory computers. Larus's research spanned a number of areas: including new and efficient techniques for measuring and recording executing programs' behavior, tools for analyzing and manipulating compiled and linked programs, programming languages for parallel computing, tools for verifying program correctness, and techniques for compiler analysis and optimization.

Larus received his MS and PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989, and an AB in Applied Mathematics from Harvard in 1980. At Berkeley, Larus developed one of the first systems to analyze Lisp programs and determine how to best execute them on a parallel computer.

Larus has been an active contributor to the programming languages, compiler, and computer architecture communities. He has published many papers and served on numerous program committees and NSF and NRC panels. Larus became an ACM Fellow in 2006.

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