HeteroPar 2025

Keynote speaker: Michel Steuwer

Title: Programming Language Design for Heterogeneous Systems

Abstract: Programming heterogeneous systems poses special challenges. Mixing multiple hardware architectures to achieve high performance is a demanding task even for advanced programmers. One might think that programming languages are a key tool for empowering programmers to confidently write correct and fast software for heterogeneous systems. I agree! However, maybe surprisingly few programming languages for heterogeneous and high-performance systems have been proposed. For example, for GPUs, most common programmers still write CUDA paired with C++ or possibly Python, the same languages from when GPUs opened up for general computations almost two decades ago.

In this talk, I will discuss opportunities for programming language design to improve the productivity of developers and help them to write better software exploiting the performance potential of modern heterogeneous systems. I will showcase our experience of developing Descend, a Rust-inspired programming language for heterogeneous systems with GPUs, and discuss advantages but also current limitations of advanced type systems for developing high-performance software. I will also look ahead and point out future directions where programming language design could play a vital role in making the development of software for heterogeneous systems more robust and efficient.

Short bio: Michel Steuwer is a Professor at Technische Universität Berlin, leading the chair of Compilers and Programming Languages. Before joining TU Berlin, he was a (senior) lecturer at the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. He received his PhD from the University of Münster.

Michel is most well-known for his work on high-performance, often domain-specific, languages and compilers for heterogeneous hardware systems, especially GPUs. In this work, he explores how to apply principled formal methods, such as strategic term rewriting and equality saturation, to improve the performance of practically relevant applications on modern hardware devices. His research has been published in all major ACM SIGPLAN venues, won multiple awards, including best paper awards at CGO and SLE, the most cited papers at ICFP 2015 and CGO 2017, and an ACM SIGPLAN and Communications of the ACM Research Highlight.

Michel has been active in the research community, serving on the steering committees of CGO and PPoPP, acting as general chair of PPoPP 2024, as well as program committee co-chair for CGO 2024. He strongly believes in artifact evaluation and was instrumental in establishing it at the leading compiler conferences, CC and CGO.

HeteroPar will be held on August 26, 2025 (full day workshop) in Dresden, Germany (collocated with Euro-Par 2025). HeteroPar'2025 will be an in-person event.

Registration: At least one author must register to the workshop to present the paper and to have it published in the final LNCS proceedings (see Euro-Par'25 registration page for details).

Pre-final version: Feel free to prepare a pre-final version of your manuscript to be distributed during the conference and upload it to EasyChair as soon as possible. Please consider: i) the reviews while preparing the final version; ii) strictly adhere to the LNCS style; and iii) the page limit is 12 pages (long paper). The PDFs of accepted papers will be collected from EasyChair to assemble a password-protected zip download from the Euro-Par website.

Camera-ready: Accepted papers that are presented at the workshop, will be published in a revised form in a special Euro-Par Workshop Volume in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series after the Euro-Par conference. All the camera-ready copies of papers for Springer should be provided by TBDth of TBD (a couple of weeks after the conference). The papers should be submitted in PDF, following the Springer LNCS format . Paper length must not exceed 12 pages (including references).