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[Colloquium] Robust Evaluation of Expressions by Distributed Virtual Machines

October 19, 2012

Watch Colloquium: 

M4V file (634 MB)

  • Date: Friday, October 19, 2012 
  • Time: 12:00 pm — 12:50 pm 
  • Place: Centennial Engineering Center 1041

Lance R. Williams
Department of Computer Science University of New Mexico 

We show how expressions written in a functional programming language can be robustly evaluated on a modular asynchronous spatial computer by compiling them into a distributed virtual machine comprised of reied bytecodes undergoing diusion and communicating via messages containing encapsulated virtual machine states. Because the semantics of the source language are purely functional, multiple instances of each reied bytecode and multiple execution threads can coexist without inconsistency in the same distributed heap.

 

Bio: Lance R. Williams received his BS degree in computer science from the Pennsylvania State University and his MS and PhD degrees in computer science from the University of Massachusetts. Prior to joining UNM, he was a post-doctoral scientist at NEC Research Institute. His research interests include computer vision and graphics, digital image processing, and neural computation.