Submitted by Rachel Gardner on Tue, 07/11/2023 - 12:16
We’re very pleased to welcome Dr Tobias Grosser as a new member of our faculty.
Tobias has joined us from the University of Edinburgh where he was a Reader in Compilers and Runtime Systems in the School of Informatics, and a member of the Compiler and Architecture Design Group.
He has taken up a role here as an Associate Professor in Compiler Design. Welcome, Tobias!
Tobias's interests are compilers, programming languages, and high-performance computing. However, he defines these areas broadly, asking questions such as 'How can compilers contribute to understanding climate change?', 'Can formal verification increase confidence in mission-critical software stacks?' and 'Can the design of high-performance code become a smooth and interactive experience for developers?'.
"In my research," he says, "I address problems important to society through an ambitious research agenda powered by prioritising a supportive, diverse and wellbeing-aware team.
"Here at Cambridge," he adds, "I am looking forward to pairing my open-source-first research approach with Cambridge’s impressive track-record of open-source-based computer science research.
"I am excited to collaborate with the global developer communities to jointly bring the power of open and fast-evolving software to hardware design, formal verification and compiler design, and aiming to show direct positive impact on climate science and other applications critical to our society."
Tobias is best known for his work on polyhedral loop optimisation in compilers such as GCC (Graphite) and LLVM (Polly) during his Master’s at the University of Passau (Germany) with Christian Lengauer and later his PhD as a Google Fellow at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, UPMC and INRIA, Paris, with Albert Cohen.
As Ambizione Fellow at ETH Zurich, Tobias expanded his research towards high-performance linear programming solvers for static analysis, domain-specific compilers for climate modelling and more, as well as open-source software for hardware design.
Today, Tobias is interested in bringing open-source production compiler technology to a wide range of domains (eg, databases, SMT solvers and formal theorem provers). He is particularly interested in identifying new ideas that cross domain boundaries.
