Saman Amarasinghe

Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS)

Principal Investigator, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)

Prof. Saman Amarasinghe leads the Commit compiler research group in MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), which focuses on programming languages and compilers that maximize application performance on modern computing platforms. He is a world leader in the field of high-performance domain-specific languages. Prof. Amarasinghe's group developed the Halide, TACO, Simit, StreamIt, StreamJIT, PetaBricks, MILK, Cimple, and GraphIt domain-specific languages and compilers, all of which combine language design and sophisticated compilation techniques to deliver unprecedented performance for targeted application domains such as image processing, stream computations, and graph analytics. Dr. Amarasinghe also pioneered the application of machine learning for compiler optimizations, from Meta optimization in 2003 to OpenTuner extendable autotuner today. With professor Anant Agarwal, he co-led the Raw architecture project, which did pioneering work on scalable multicores.

Prof. Amarasinghe's entrepreneurship activities include founding Determina, Inc. (acquired by VMWare) based on computer security research pioneered in his research group at MIT and co-founding Lanka Internet Services, Ltd., the first Internet Service Provider in Sri Lanka. Prof. Amarasinghe is also the faculty director of MIT Global Startup Labs, whose summer programs in 17 countries have helped to create more than 20 thriving startups.

Prof. Amarasinghe developed the popular Performance Engineering of Software Systems (6.172) class with Professor Charles Leiserson. He also created individualized software project classes such as the Open Source Software Project Lab, the Open Source Entrepreneurship Lab, and the Bring Your Own Software Project Lab.

Prof. Amarasinghe received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from Cornell University in 1988, a master’s degree and PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1990 and 1997 respectively, and joined the MIT faculty as an assistant professor in 1997. He was elected as an ACM fellow in 2019.

Selected Research

The primary motivation of my research is to discover novel approaches to improve the performance of modern computer systems without unduly increasing the complexity faced by application developers, compiler writers, or computer architects.

Teaching

Classes

Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Fall 2020, Fall 2019
Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2021, Fall 2020
Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Fall 2016, Fall 2015,Fall 2014, Fall 2013, Fall 2011, Fall 2010, Fall 2009
Spring 2010, Spring 2009, Fall 2007, Fall 2006, Fall 2005, Fall 2002, Fall 2001, Fall 2000, Fall 1999, Fall 1998
Fall 2017
Spring 2017
Spring 2016, Spring 2015
Spring 2014, Spring 2013, Spring 2012, Spring 2011, Spring 2008