Programming GPU systems poses special challenges. Mixing GPU and CPU hardware architectures to achieve high performance is a demanding task even for advanced programmers. One might think that programming languages are a key tool for empowering programmers to confidently write correct and fast software for GPU systems. I agree! However, maybe surprisingly few programming languages for heterogeneous and high-performance systems have been proposed. Most common programmers still write CUDA paired with C++ or possibly Python, the same languages from when GPUs opened up for general computations almost two decades ago.

In this talk, I will discuss opportunities for programming language design to improve the productivity of developers and help them to write better software exploiting the performance potential of modern GPU systems. I will showcase our experience of developing Descend, a Rust-inspired programming language for heterogeneous systems with GPUs, and discuss advantages but also current limitations of advanced type systems for developing high-performance software. I will also look ahead and point out future directions where programming language design could play a vital role in making the development of software for heterogeneous systems more robust and efficient.

I am a professor at Technische Universität Berlin and lead the chair of Compilers and Programming Languages. I am a member of the Institute of Software Engineering and Theoretical Computer Science in the Faculty IV – Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at TU Berlin.

Before joining TU Berlin, I was a lecturer (assistant professor) in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, a lecturer at the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh. I received my PhD from the University of Münster in Germany.

I am interested in programming languages and compilers. I have a particular interest in programming languages for parallel programming, heterogeneous and GPU computing, and novel compilation techniques for high-level domain-specific languages.