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Kedama is an extension of the Etoys tile-scripting environment to support exploration of the emergent properties of decentralized systems, such as traffic jams or ant colonies, by simulating them with massive numbers of end-user scriptable objects. As part of Etoys, Kedama has a large installed base of users; in particular, it is installed on each XO computer produced by the One Laptop Per Child project ( http://laptop.org). OpenCL is a low-level, industry-standard framework for performing general-purpose computation on the GPU.
The goal of the project is to take advantage of the enormous power of modern GPUs to enable end-users to construct larger and more elaborate simulations. The successful applicant will use the existing Squeak OpenCL bindings to implement the current Kedama primitives, and to implement a GPU-friendly memory model (although Kedama's end-user model is massively parallel, the current implementation takes some reasonable shortcuts in it's CPU implementation). Once these goals have been achieved, performance will be profiled to identify the hotspots most amenable to optimization (we have an idea where these will be, but you never know until you measure). Based on this data and the amount of time remaining, suitable optimizations will be chosen and implemented.
The precise details of the project are open-ended, and there is no shortage of technical challenges for a sophisticated applicant to solve. However, since the intent is to make the result immediately available to the existing Kedama/Etoys community, it is better to set conservative goals to ensure a production-quality result. For similar reasons, it is essential to minimize changes to Kedama's end-user semantics, so that existing Kedama programs continue to run. The applicant's proposal should reflect this, although they are encouraged to propose a plan with optional, more ambitious goals that will be attempted if time permits.
The student will improve their skills in two main areas: high-performance computing and end-user design. They will implement cutting-edge GPGPU techniques in Squeak, and learn how to efficiently harness the power of the GPU from a highly-dynamic language (i.e. how the Squeak/OpenCL binding is implemented). Secondly, the student will gain insight into a real-world design problem: the tension between end-user accessibility and maximum performance for a sizable community of users.
Benefits to the Community
Two separate communities will benefit from this project: Squeak and Kedama/Etoys. The educational goals of Kedama/Etoys will be served by enabling users to undertake even more ambitious simulations. Squeak will gain an application that provides an example of using massively-parallel hardware from a highly dynamic language. Given Squeak's popularity in higher education, and the interest already shown in Squeak's young OpenCL bindings, this project will be sure to draw the interest of many talented students in the years to come.
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