Leaving Los Alamos National Laboratory and joining GSI Technology

April 1, 2022

In December I left Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) to join GSI Technology as a compiler developer.

I have spent about 8.5 years at LANL. Physics and computing have always been my passions, so I got a Master in theoretical physics in Czechia, and then Ph.D. in chemical physics in the U.S. LANL is a great place for computational physics. I met and worked with many amazing people. It has been intellectually very satisfying to work on the projects that I was able to help with and things to learn. LANL has famous beginnings during the Manhattan Project, and it has continuously evolved since then. For somebody who was born behind the Iron Curtain, it’s been an honor to work there. If you like physics or scientific computing, I can only recommend applying there.

The last few years I have been working very hard to create a modern Fortran compiler called LFortran. The way we have designed it is so that you can target the intermediate representation, that we call the Abstract Semantic Representation (ASR), from other languages also. It is a compiler toolchain that any array language can target. I got an opportunity to join GSI Technology to focus full time to work on this toolchain, to make their APU chips easier to program. We are also developing a new Python frontend called LPython. Both LFortran and LPython are effectively thin frontends that do parsing to a language-specific Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) and then transform AST to a language-independent ASR by applying and checking the surface-language semantics.

Both LPython and LFortran compilers will remain independent open-source projects with no particular specialization to any particular array chip. I am joining a very good compiler team, and it is an opportunity to deliver on this broader compiler project as well as LFortran and LPython in particular.

If you are interested in collaborating on any of these projects, please let me know. We have intern and other opportunities available.

Nifty tech tag lists from Wouter Beeftink