Abstract:
Specialized hardware accelerators like GPUs or FPGAs have become a prominent part of the current computing landscape. However, developing heterogeneous applications is limited to a small subset of programmers with specialized hardware knowledge. To democratize heterogeneous computing, now is the time that the software engineering community should design new waves of refactoring, testing, and debugging tools for heterogeneous application development.

In this talk, I will first describe technical challenges in making heterogeneity widely accessible to software developers. I will showcase my group’s recent work (HeteroGen) on automated program repair and test input generation for heterogeneous application development with FPGA. HeteroGen takes C/C++ code as input and automatically generates an HLS (high-level synthesis) version with test behavior preservation and better performance. I will briefly describe HeteroFuzz that adapts test input generation to detect platform-dependent divergence between CPU and FPGA. I will then conclude with future research directions that the software engineering community could help advance.

Speaker Biography:
Miryung Kim is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at UCLA. She has taken a leadership role in defining the emerging area of software engineering for data analytics (SE4DA and SE4ML). She conducted the first systematic study of refactoring practices in industry and quantified refactoring benefits using Windows version history at Microsoft. Her group created automated testing and debugging for Apache Spark and conducted the largest scale study of data scientists in industry. Her current research focuses on developer tools for heterogeneous computing applications with FPGA.

She is a Program Co-Chair of ESEC/FSE 2022. She was a Keynote Speaker at ASE 2019 and a Distinguished Speaker at UIUC, UMN, and UC Irvine. She received NSF CAREER award, 10 Year Most Influential Paper Award ICSME, ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, Okawa Foundation Award, Google Faculty Award, Microsoft Software Engineering Innovations Foundation Award, and Humboldt Fellowship. She produced 6 professors (Columbia, Purdue, two at Virginia Tech, etc). For her impact on nurturing the next generation of academics, she received the ACM SIGSOFT Influential Educator Award.