Newswise — Gang-Ryung Uh, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Boise State University, has been awarded a very competitive Google Faculty Research Award, created to support cutting-edge core research in computer science, engineering and related fields. Uh's award was in the field of optimizing compiler construction for a low-power ARM cortex processor.
As communication and media applications become more complex, mobile devices must become more sophisticated to manage the increasing quantity of data and the flow of instructions. At the same time, energy expenditure also is a primary system design constraint, since battery life is a critical factor in the usefulness of the product. To resolve these conflicting design issues, Uh’s proposal is to develop an optimizing compiler for an ARM processor, which currently is used for smartphones. In particular, his compiler produces machine code for an ARM Cortex-A8 processor that matches ARM Cortex-A9 performance, but with significantly reduced power consumption.
Senior computer science student Ryan Baird has been working for this Google project since summer 2012. As a major project activity, Baird and Uh have been streamlining two national compiler infrastructures: LLVM and VPO compilers. As it stands, the streamlined compiler can produce both correct results and highly optimized machine code for more than 10 large applications in MiBench benchmark suite. The results clearly indicate the potential of the primary project outcome. Based on this initial success, Baird has been accepted to the computer science graduate program at Florida State University with a full research scholarship.
Google Research Awards are one-year unrestricted gifts intended to support the work of world-class full-time faculty members at top universities around the world. The funding provides faculty the opportunity to fund a graduate student and work directly with Google research scientists and engineers. The most recent funding round consisted of 104 awards across 21 different focus areas for a total of nearly $6 million. The subject areas that received the highest level of support were systems and infrastructure, human computer interaction, and mobile. In addition, 28 percent of the funding was awardedto universities outside the U.S.
More information about the Google Faculty Research Awards can be found at research.google.com/university/relations/research_awards.html.
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