Best Paper Award for Floris-Jan Willemsen
Research Software Engineer and PhD candidate Floris-Jan Willemsen has won the Best Paper Award at the 54th International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP), one of the oldest continuously running conferences in computer science. His paper presentation in San Diego, California, followed immediately after a keynote lecture by Turing Award laureate Jack Dongarra.
The award-winning paper, Efficient Construction of Large Search Spaces for Auto-Tuning, was co-authored with Rob van Nieuwpoort (Leiden University) and Ben van Werkhoven (Leiden University & Netherlands eScience Center). The research tackles a longstanding bottleneck in automatic performance tuning – the process of exploring vast numbers of code variants to achieve optimal performance on modern hardware.
Existing methods to construct such search spaces are often slow and lack a solid theoretical foundation. Willemsen and his co-authors reformulated the problem as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP), enabling them to leverage powerful solver technologies. They developed a runtime parser that translates user-defined constraints into efficient solver-compatible forms and introduced optimizations that exploit common patterns in auto-tuning.
These innovations, integrated into open-source tools, drastically reduce construction time: four orders of magnitude faster than brute-force enumeration, and one to four orders of magnitude faster than the current state-of-the-art. The recognition at ICPP underscores the international impact of this research, which enables scientists and engineers to efficiently optimize software performance for next-generation computing systems.
Read Floris-Jan Willemsen’s blog here.
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