Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) are languages that typically forgo generality for a gain in productivity and some other aspect (performance, verifiability, maintainability,…). At Oracle Labs, we have been exploring the use of DSLs and their associated tools to enable productive high-performance parallel programming. During this talk, we will share some of our experience in designing and implementing these DSLs, with a focus on the Graph processing domain. We will discuss use cases that have yielded good returns on investment as well as identify hurdles for mainstream adoption.

Hassan Chafi is Director, Research & Advanced Development at Oracle Labs where he currently leads various projects. His research investigates high-performance, parallel, in-memory Graph Analytics and using domain specific languages (DSLs) to simplify parallel programming. Dr. Chafi received his PhD from Stanford University. His thesis work at Stanford focused on building a Domain Specific Language Infrastructure, Delite. He was advised by Dr. Kunle Olukotun. Prior to that, Hassan worked in the area of hardware transactional memory as part of the Transactional Coherence and Consistency (TCC) project at Stanford where he developed a scalable extension to the original TCC protocol.