Computer Science Professor Jason Cong and coauthors Yi-Hsiang Lai, Yuze Chi, Yuwei Hu, Jie Wang, Cody Hao Yu, Yuan Zhou, and Prof. Zhiru Zhang has received the Best Paper Award at the 27th ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) held in Seaside, CA, February 24-26, 2019.
Their paper, “HeteroCL: A Multi-Paradigm Programming Infrastructure for Software-Defined Reconfigurable Computing” results from a close collaboration between Prof. Zhang’s group at Cornell and Prof. Cong’s group at UCLA. HeteroCL is a multi-paradigm programming infrastructure for heterogeneous platforms integrating CPUs and FPGAs. HeteroCL not only provides a clean abstraction that decouples the algorithm from compute/data customization, but it also captures the interdependence among them. Moreover, HeteroCL incorporates spatial architecture templates including systolic arrays and stencil with dataflow architectures. HeteroCL can help developers to focus more on designing efficient algorithms rather than being distracted by low-level implementation details.
The ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays is the premier conference for presentation of advances in all areas related to the FPGA technology, including FPGA architecture, FPGA circuit design, CAD for FPGAs, high-level abstractions and tools for FPGAs, FPGA-based and FPGA-like computing engines, as well as applications and design studies. This year’s Best Paper Award is selected from a total of 161 submissions.
Beyond winning the FPGA’19 Award, Professor Cong also served as the chair of the UCLA Computer Science Department from 2005 to 2008. Currently, he is a Distinguished Chancellor’s Professor at the Computer Science Department of University of California, Los Angeles, the Director of Center for Domain-Specific Computing (funded by NSF Expeditions in Computing Award), and the director of VLSI Architecture, Synthesis, and Technology (VAST) Laboratory.
Dr. Cong’s research interests include electronic design automation, energy-efficient computing, customized computing for big-data applications, and highly scalable algorithms. He has published over 400 research papers in these areas, including 12 Best Paper Awards, and three 10-Year Retrospective Most Influential Paper Awards. His work on FPGA technology mapping (FlowMap) received the 2011 ACM/IEEE A. Richard Newton Technical Impact Award in Electric Design Automation “for pioneering work on technology mapping for FPGA that has made significant impact to the FPGA research community and industry”, and was the first inductee to the FPGA and Reconfigurable Computing Hall of Fame by ACM TCFPGA.