VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Alexander Collins
dblp:115/7939
· DBLP profile ↗
4ranked-venue papers
2as first author
2since 2021 · last 2026
0009-0001-8140-5979ORCID · reported
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Systems, architecture and hardware · 3 · 2 first-author · 1 since 2021Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 2 · 2 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Nsight Python: A Python-First Profiling Toolkit for Seamless GPU Kernel Analysis (Tool)abstractThe proliferation of Python DSLs for developing kernels has democratized GPU programming. While kernel development is now Python-native, performance analysis and optimization still rely on external tools and fragmented workflows. Bastian Hagedorn, Alexander Collins, Tony Mongkolsmai, Vinod Grover |
CC | 2 |
| 2026 | Tawa: Automatic Warp Specialization for Modern GPUs with Asynchronous ReferencesabstractModern GPUs feature specialized hardware units that enable high-performance, asynchronous dataflow execution. However, the conventional SIMT programming model is fundamentally misaligned with this task-parallel hardware, creating a significant programmability gap. While hardware-level warp specialization is the key to unlocking peak performance, it forces developers to manually orchestrate complex, low-level communication and software pipelines—a process that is labor-intensive, error-prone, and unsustainable. To address this challenge, we present Tawa, an automated compiler that systematically generates high-performance, warp-specialized code from a high-level, tile-based program. Central to our approach is a novel IR abstraction, asynchronous references (aref), which expresses warp-level communication without exposing low-level hardware details. Using this abstraction, Tawa automatically partitions programs into producer-consumer roles and manages the intricate dataflow pipeline, relieving developers of invasive kernel rewriting. Evaluation on NVIDIA H100 GPUs across representative LLM kernels shows that Tawa delivers high hardware utilization, achieving up to 1.1 × speedup over highly optimized cuBLAS GEMM kernels. For attention workloads, Tawa attains 1.2× speedup over Triton and matches the performance of the hand-optimized CUTLASS C++ FlashAttention-3 kernel with far less programming effort. Hongzheng Chen, Alexander Collins, Bastian Hagedorn, Evghenii Gaburov, Masahiro Masuda, Matthew Brookhart, Chris Sullivan, Jason Knight, Zhiru Zhang, Vinod Grover |
CGO | 3 |
| 2013 | MaSiF: Machine learning guided auto-tuning of parallel skeletonsabstractParallel skeletons provide a predefined set of parallel templates that can be combined, nested and parameterized with sequential code to produce complex parallel programs. The implementation of each skeleton includes parameters that have a significant effect on performance; so carefully tuning them is vital. The optimization space formed by these parameters is complex, non-linear, exhibits multiple local optima and is program dependent. This makes manual tuning impractical. Effective automatic tuning is therefore essential for the performance of parallel skeleton programs. In this paper we present MaSiF, a novel tool to auto-tune the parallelization parameters of skeleton parallel programs. It reduces the size of the parameter space using a combination of machine learning, via nearest neighbor classification, and linear dimensionality reduction using Principal Components Analysis. To auto-tune a new program, a set of program features is determined statically and used to compute k nearest neighbors from a set of training programs. Previously collected performance data for the nearest neighbors is used to reduce the size of the search space using Principal Components Analysis. Good parallelization parameters are found quickly by searching this smaller search space. We evaluate MaSiF for two existing parallel frameworks: Threading Building Blocks and FastFlow. MaSiF achieves 89% of the performance of the oracle on average. This exploration requires just 45 parameters values on average, which is ~0.05% of the optimization space. In contrast, a state-of-the-art machine learning approach achieves 51%. MaSiF achieves an average speedup of 1.32× over parallelization parameters chosen by human experts. Alexander Collins, Christian Fensch, Hugh Leather, Murray Cole |
HiPC | 1 |
| 2012 | MaSiF: machine learning guided auto-tuning of parallel skeletonsabstractWe present MaSiF, a novel tool to auto-tune parallelization parameters of skeleton parallel programs. It reduces the cost of searching the optimization space using a combination of machine learning and linear dimensionality reduction. To auto-tune a new program, a set of program features is determined statically and used to compute k nearest neighbors from a set of training programs. Previously collected performance data for the nearest neighbors is used to reduce the size of the search space using Principal Components Analysis. This results in a set of eigenvectors that are used to search the reduced space. Alexander Collins, Christian Fensch, Hugh Leather |
PACT | 1 |