Personal home page:

Paul H J Kelly

Professor of Software Technology, Group Leader, Software Performance Optimisation

Department of Computing (map)

Imperial College London

180 Queen's Gate

London SW7 2BZ, UK

Telephone: +44 (0) 20 7594 8332

Fax: +44 (0) 20 7581 8024

Email: p.kellyZZZ@doc.ic.ac.uk (please delete the ZZZ before you use this address).

If you fear your message has been treated as junk, please include the following letters in the Subject line:

Final-year (MEng and MSc) project students: please have a look at my project proposals on CATE (Imperial students only I'm afraid). Project proposals are the starting point for discussion and negotiation. Project proposals are also good topics for Independent Study Options for MAC students - feel free to browse.

Interests:

Computer systems issues underlying performance
Applying a broad range of mathematical and theoretical ideas to computer systems problems
Performance evaluation, modelling and prediction
Languages, compilers and operating systems for parallel computing
Caching, combining and randomisation in processors, multiprocessors, operating systems and wide-area networks
Software tools for portable parallel programming
Algebraic program transformation, especially applied to optimising parallel programs
Irregular and data-intensive applications
Language, linguistics, literature, literary theory

Not enough?

The junction between the limits of the universe and the limits of the mind.

News

I am Program Committee co-chair for the ACM Computing Frontiers conference (Bertinoro, Italy, May 2010). Please send us exciting papers on research at the Frontiers of Computer Science (surely all good research is at the frontiers?).
My Inaugural Lecture (marking my promotion to Professor) took place on Wednesday May 13th, in the Clore theatre, title "Over and over again: the discipline of parallel software engineering". Slides are available online here.
This year's Imperial College London Games and Media Event (GaME '09) will take place on Monday June 1st 2009. Please register if you would like to come.

Activities:

Research: I lead Imperial's Software Performance Optimisation research group.
Computer systems research is a broad area, and the group has worked in a wide range of areas (operating systems, cache coherency, debugging, specialisation, programming languages), the main focus at present is performance optimisation of dynamically-composed software components. This is a key enabling technology for flexible, reusable software. As you can see from the publications and projects listed below, I have an abiding interest in making high-performance (and especially parallel) computing easier:
Program committees:
- Program Committee co-Chair, ACM Computing Frontiers 2010
- Vice-chair, Software, IPDPS 2008
- Programme committee member, GPCE 2007
- Programme committee member, IPDPS 2007 (Algorithms track)
- Programme committee member, NPC 2007
- Programme committee member, International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS 2006)
- Programme Committee member, EuroPar 2006, Topic 4: Compilers for High Performance
Current lecture courses:
Other teaching:
- Masters in Advanced Computing - Research Seminar - "Applied Computer Science"
- Parallelising and restructuring compilers (short course, occasional)
- Ideas for student projects (undergraduate and postgraduate)
- For ISOs (Independent Study Options), and other student literature survey projects (undergraduate and postgraduate): please look at the project proposals (above)
- First-year Computing "topics" programme - Software Performance Optimisation
Administration:
Software
- Taskgraph Metaprogramming Library: a C++ package that supports
  - Run-time code generation - programs that generate code on the fly, then execute it (the first step towards "multi-stage" programming)
  - Meta-programming - having built a piece of code, you can apply various transformations to it (such as loop interchange and tiling).
- Aperture: A proof-of-concept Massively Multiuser Video Conferencing application. A virtual environment with real-time sound and avatars with webcam images for faces. Developed by a 2008-9 undergraduate project group; source and Windows installer available.
- DeepWeaver-1: A declarative framework for analysis and optimization components for Java - in fact an extension of the abc AspectJ compiler with a Prolog/Datalog-like query language and the power to analyse and restructure code within and across methods. DeepWeaver-1 is not yet ready for open release but if you are keen please get in touch by email.
- DJPROF - DJProf is an experimental profiling tool for Java programs implemented entirely in Java and Aspect/J. DJProf was designed as a tool for research in AspectJ and AOP. It was developed by my PhD student David Pearce in the summer of 2004 during an internship with the AspectJ team based at IBM Hursley, UK.
- The Pointer Constraint System, by my PhD graduate David Pearce (a re-implementation of some of this work is being incorporated into gcc 4.1; see Dan Berlin's article in the 2005 GCC Summit proceedings).
- Bounds checking for C, by my MSc graduate Richard Jones, but long since maintained by Herman ten Brugge, enhanced by Ruwase and Lam ("CRED") and now a sourceforge project. See here, where we explain how we avoid changing the binary pointer representation while achieving better checking than, for example, Mudflap or Purify (though Purify does things we don't do).
- MIRO - Mudflap Improved with Referent Objects. A re-implementation of the bounds checking work by MEng project student Alex Lamaison. This version is based on the Mudflap stuff in GCC 4 and, because it works on GCC's Gimple IR it works for C++ as well as C. We are looking for support (or volunteers) to take this work further.