Yuka Ikarashi
MIT
yuka@csail.mit.edu
Bio
Yuka Ikarashi is a fifth-year PhD candidate at MIT CSAIL. She received her MSc from MIT in 2022 and her BSc from the University of Tokyo in 2020. Passionate about compiler systems and programming languages for real-world applications, she co-created the Exo programming language. She has previously worked at Apple, Amazon, and CERN, applying her research to various high-performance hardware and applications. She has been awarded the Quad Fellowship, the Masason Foundation Fellowship, the Funai Foundation Fellowship, and the ML and Systems Rising Stars Award. Originally from Tokyo, Japan, she is an avid traveler and has visited 34 countries.
Areas of Research
- Programming Languages
Exocompilation for Specialized Hardware
As single-core performance has reached its limit, exploiting the peak performance of heterogeneous accelerators and specialized instructions has become crucial in many applications. Compilers struggle to keep pace with the diverse and rapidly evolving hardware targets, and automatic optimization often fails to guarantee state-of-the-art performance. Consequently, high-performance libraries are still commonly coded and optimized by hand, at great expense, in low-level C and assembly. User-schedulable languages (USLs) have been proposed to address this challenge by decoupling algorithms and scheduling. In the poster session, I will share our work on Exo, a USL based on the principle of exocompilation, which externalizes hardware-specific code generation from the compiler. Furthermore, I will share our most recent work on the new scheduling language design that allows externalizing the scheduling library in user code. Additionally, I will discuss other projects that borrow ideas from USLs and the lessons we have learned from the industry adoption of Exo.