James R. Larus

Associate Professor

Computer Sciences Department
University of Wisconsin
1210 W. Dayton St.
Madison, WI 53706-1685

telephone: (608) 262-1204
fax: (608) 262-9777
email: larus@cs.wisc.edu
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~larus/

Research Summary

My research focuses on problems in programming computers. As part of the Wisconsin Wind Tunnel (WWT) Project, I have helped develop a hybrid (software-hardware), shared-memory computer architecture that facilitates programming and compiling for parallel machines. Currently, my students and I are developing languages, compilers, and tools to demonstrate and exploit the power of user-level coherence policies.

I'm also interested performance evaluation tools that help programmers understand and improve their programs' performance. Recently, Tom Ball and I developed an efficient path profiling algorithm, which provides a more detailed understanding of control-flow within routines and which has identified new possibilities for better compilers.

Sample Recent Publications

Optimizing communication in HPF programs for fine-grain distributed shared memory (with S. Chandra), 6th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP '97), 1996.

Teapot: Language support for writing memory coherence protocols (with S. Chandra and B. Richards), ACM SIGPLAN '96 Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI '96), 1996.