This talk examines some trends in the modern developments of memory systems and their relations with the massive parallelism in processors and applications. It then draws on some recent work on GPU to explain the important role of programming systems in bridging the gap; it particularly emphasizes the importance of innovations for enabling better software controllability, more software elasticity, and inter-thread data locality enhancements. The talk further discusses the implications brought to programming systems by the increasingly blurred boundaries among memory, storage, and processing.

Xipeng Shen is an associate professor at the Computer Science Department, North Carolina State University (NCSU). He has been an IBM Canada CAS Research Faculty Fellow since 2010, and a receipt of the 2010 NSF CAREER Award, 2011 DOE Early Career Award, and 2015 Google Faculty Research Award. Before joining NCSU, he was an Adina Allen Term Distinguished Associate Professor at the College of William and Mary.