Abhijat Vichare

Eminent Speaker

Short CV: Abhijat Vichare conducted computer simulations (on HPC systems) of atomic clusters to study the melting transition for his doctoral work in Physics. As a faculty at the Department of Computer Science, University of Pune, he taught programming languages, system software, operating systems etc. At the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay, he was a Research Scientist working on the GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) system to unearth its architecture given the implementation. Subsequently, as a Senior Scientist at the Computational Research Laboratories (CRL, now a part of TCS) he worked on the Eka supercomputer to perform simulations in Physics, and develop work flows for other application domains like Biology (drug discovery), and CFD. He has served on the steering committee of the ACM-IEEE CC2020 Computing Curricula project. He has been offering his services in system software and compilers, and education development.

Title of Talk 1: How does GCC work?

Synopsis: The GNU Compiler Collection is an optimizing, highly portable compiler created by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Its portability and performance have made it the standard reference compiler against which other compilers are compared with today. Industrially, it has enabled organizations - small and large - to reduce their costs of implementation by simply porting the GCC system to their architecture. Academically, the availability of its source has opened up opportunities for teaching and research using a system used in practice to compile almost every open source, as well as other software out there. This talk introduces the essential architecture of the compiler for anyone interested in porting it for commercial as well as academic goals. A first course in compiler construction would be useful to make the most of this talk.

Title of Talk 2: A Framework to start writing your own OS.

Synopsis: This talk is targeted at OS teachers and students motivated to write their own OS. Operating Systems are notoriously difficult to write. Conceptually complex and practically dealing with a myriad of constraints, the task of writing an OS is typically considered formidable. Most of us imagine ourselves to not be well prepared to undertake such a project. On the other hand, an OS is possibly the first course that a student encounters that brings together a lot of concepts (including mathematical) and skill from other courses into a final visible work. It is also an excellent course to teach core engineering principles and practice in computing. In this talk we present a novel approach that presents a systematic incremental approach to writing your own single processor OS. At each step along the way we have a working system that offers excellent milestones and keeps the enthusiasm alive. We present the first two stages of our approach to show how the details presented can be further brought to practice. A first course in OS, good C programming, some knowledge of programming languages and an exposure to the GNU tool chain would help in taking the most out of this talk.

Title of Talk 3: Mathematical Modeling in Computer Science

Synopsis: This talk is an attempt to encourage a more mathematical approach to computing and is mainly targeted for students intending to pursue advanced studies in Computer Science. We try to bring out the role of mathematics in modeling the world around us - physically and computationally. We illustrate the idea of modeling by considering a few simple examples. We use elementary Logic to illustrate the mathematical thinking style. Some simple Physics is used to illustrate how mathematics is used to model the physical world. Finally, we present the use of mathematics in Computer Science by pointing out the various models of computation, as well as some other specific problems that have been successfully modeled using mathematics. Contrary to what the title might suggest, this talk does not use mathematics; instead it is an attempt to bring out the role of mathematics in modeling CS problems.

Abhijat Vichare

Qualifications: PhD Physics

Title: Consultant

Affiliation: None

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhijat-vichare-8288222/

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Email: [email protected]