Date: Tuesday, January 27, 2026
Time: 11:45 a.m. to 12:45 p.m.
Location: G01 Gates Hall
Speaker: Yuka Ikarashi
Abstract: Performance is the currency of modern computing. Achieving peak throughput on fast‑evolving accelerators demands more control than today's compilers provide. I will present Exo and the Exocompilation paradigm: a user‑schedulable programming language that shifts two responsibilities traditionally hard‑coded in compilers–hardware backends and optimization strategies–into safe, extensible user libraries. In Exo, optimizations are expressed as verified rewrites that guarantee functional equivalence, and low‑level primitives (e.g., explicit instruction selection, GPU asynchrony) give programmers precise control. This design enables targeting CPUs, GPUs, and matrix engines, and supports concise, reusable scheduling libraries that match or surpass the performance of state-of-the-art libraries such as cuBLAS and MKL. Exo‑generated kernels already ship at scale, including on Apple devices.
Bio: Yuka Ikarashi is a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate at MIT CSAIL. She received her MS from MIT in 2022 and her BS from the University of Tokyo in 2020. Passionate about compilers and programming languages for high-performance computing, she created the Exo programming language. She has previously worked at Apple, Amazon, and CERN, applying her research to various accelerators and applications. She has been awarded the Quad Fellowship, the Masason Foundation Fellowship, the Funai Foundation Fellowship, the ML and Systems Rising Stars Award, and the Rising Stars in EECS Award. Originally from Tokyo, Japan, she is an avid traveler and has visited 35 countries.
https://people.csail.mit.edu/yuka/
