Chair News

Jerónimo Castrillón-Mazo, Chair of Compiler Construction at the Faculty of Computer Science at TUD Dresden University of Technology (TUD), has been awarded one of the European Union's highly endowed ERC Consolidator Grants. His project, COMpilers for ExTreme Heterogeneity (COMETH), which will run for five years and receive EUR 2 million in funding, aims to develop a new generation of tools that will simplify the programming of increasingly complex computer systems for scientists, engineers, and other users.

The Chair for Compiler Construction hosted the first IEEE Cross-disciplinary Conference on Memory-Centric Computing (CCMCC), held on October 8-10, 2025, in Dresden. Our group was represented by Prof. Jeronimo Castrillon, Asif Ali Khan, Joao Paulo Cardoso de Lima, Anderson Faustino da Silva, Robert Khasanov, and Alexander Kusnezoff, with valuable organizational support from Christina Norkus and Conny Okuma. It was a pleasure to contribute to the event as part of the organizing team, serving as Local Organizing Chair and Finance Chair. During the CCMCC, Joao Paulo presented our paper titled "Efficient In-Memory Acceleration of Sparse Block Diagonal LLMs". The work introduces an automated framework with novel mapping and scheduling strategies to accelerate sparse LLM inference on compute-in-memory accelerators by exploiting block-diagonal sparsity.

Many thanks to Prof. Nima TaheriNejad, the General Chair, and to everyone who contributed to making this first edition a success. We are already looking forward to the next CCMCC, which will take place in Lyon, France, in October 2026.

Asif Ali Khan and João Paulo de Lima represented the CC Chair at the 62nd Design Automation Conference (DAC'25), held from June 22nd to 25th in San Francisco, California. João gave a presentation and participated in a poster session, showcasing joint research with Prof. M. Hassan Najafi and Prof. Sercan Aygun on an error-tolerant computing method based on emerging non-volatile memories. Their paper, titled All-in-Memory Stochastic Computing using ReRAM, introduces a complete in-memory stochastic computing flow using ReRAM devices, handling random number generation, computation, and binary conversion all within memory. By exploiting ReRAM's physical properties and stochastic computing's error tolerance, it reduces energy and improves throughput compared to existing CMOS and ReRAM-based solutions. In addition, Asif, who was part of the technical program committee this year, was recognized with an Outstanding Reviewer Award.

The CC Chair congratulates Marcus Rossel for receiving the N.-J. Lehmann-Stiftung award for his “outstanding thesis in Computer Science with theoretical focus”. In his thesis, “An Equality Saturation Tactic for Lean”, Marcus built a tactic for the Lean theorem prover that allows mathematicians, computer scientists and others to reason about equations in a much more efficient way. It automates away tasks that can range from tedious to extremely difficult, and lets users focus on the interesting parts of the proof. This work wouldn’t have been possible without the supervision of Andres Goens, a previous PhD student of the CC Chair, who is now a professor in the University of Amsterdam. Marcus is a postgraduate researcher, working on Verified System Design Automation (VerSA) at the Barkhausen Institute in Dresden. He received the award remotely, while attending PLDI’25 in Seoul South Korea, one of top conferences in the field, where he co-authored a paper that used results from his thesis.

We also congratulate Max Kurze for receiving “3m5 award for an outstanding thesis in Computer Science”. Max is currently pursuing a PhD at the Verified System Design Automation (VerSA) group at the Barkhausen Institute in Dresden. In his thesis, “A Framework for Modular and Compositional Formal Reasoning in Koika”, Max devised a novel typed parsing and implemented a Hoare logic reasoning framework, extending Kôika’s semantics to scale provably correct designs towards trustworthy computing systems. This thesis was also supervised by a previous PhD student of the CC Chair, Sebastian Ertel, who leads the VerSA as research group leader at the Barkhausen Institute in Dresden. This is awesome work and we look forward to seeing how Max will build on it during his PhD.