News & Events

ICDS Events

Eric Sedlar

Oracle Labs VP to speak on novel programming language interface

Posted on October 12, 2017

Eric Sedlar, vice president and technical director of Oracle Labs, will deliver a talk entitled “Zero-cost multilingual program execution using GraalVM Language-Level Virtualization.” The talk will occur Oct. 24 from 1:30 to 3 p.m. in 233A HUB-Robeson Center.

This event is free and open to the public. The lecture is sponsored by the Institute for CyberScience (ICS) as part of the ICS CyberScience Seminars, a series of talks on cutting-edge topics of interest to the cyberscience research community at Penn State.

Sedlar’s talk will describe GraalVM, a new meta-interpreter that can execute multiple programming languages with competitive performance and efficiency. Penn State faculty have contributed use cases as part of the development of the interface.

Computational researchers often rely on multiple interpreted programming languages, such as Python, R, or Ruby, for their work. Each language has its own interpreter, a program that performs basic tasks like memory management and configuration. Using multiple languages can cause inefficiencies, either because different interpreters perform similar tasks redundantly, or because additional effort is needed to pass data between programs.

GraalVM addresses this problem by serving as a single interpreter for multiple programming languages, reducing duplication of effort and improving efficiency. It also allows users to combine disparate processes involving different languages and memory spaces into a single process, making multi-language programming easier.

As space is limited, please reserve a seat at the seminar by October 20.

The event includes Sedlar’s talk, an extended question-and-answer session, and time to socialize. Refreshments will be served.

In his role as vice president and technical director of Oracle Labs, Sedlar works to transfer results from the Labs’ research into Oracle products and services, as well as to set the overall technical direction for new research projects. His own research interests are in domain-specific languages and acceleration of database operations both via new hardware and using just-in-time compilation. He holds over 68 patents, and has served on standards organizations for Oracle in the World Wide Web Consortium and the Internet Engineering Task Force.

Share

Related Posts