Personal home page:

Paul H J Kelly

Professor of Software Technology,

Group Leader, Software Performance Optimisation

co-Director, Centre for Computational Methods in Science and Engineering

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:

I am head of the Software Performance Optimisation research group. Details of our weekly research talks/meetings are here.

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
distributed memory multicomputers
• Irregular and data-intensive applications
• Language, linguistics, literature, literary theory

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

• We are organising the 2012 Imperial GaME Event, a day of talks and demos developing links with the computer games and CGI industries; this year's event is on May 23rd - please register here.
• We hosted the 3rd UK GPU Computing Conference, December 14th at Goodenough College. Further details are available here.
• I gave a talk on October 11th at the London Mathematical Society's Computer Science Day, which this year was devoted to High Performance Scientific Computing at the Exascale.. The slides from my talk, entitled "Software Abstractions for many-core software engineering" are here
• This year's Imperial College London Games and Media Event (GaME '11) took place on Wednesday May 25th 2011.
• I served as Program Committee co-chair for the ACM Computing Frontiers conference (Bertinoro, Italy, May 2010).
• 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.

• 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:

  • Publications and presentations
  • Research reading group in performance optimisation of component-based software
  • Current and recent research grants
  • Research staff and students
  • PhD theses supervised
  • Ideas for student projects (undergraduate and postgraduate)
  • Undergraduate research opportunities
• 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:
  • Advanced Computer Architecture
  • Compilers (introductory, for second-year students)
  • Computer Systems (for the Industrial MSc)
• 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:
  Computing Support Group Forum
• 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.