The Programming Systems Lab is hiring research interns for summer 2015

The Programming Systems Lab, the group that I recently joined at Intel Labs, is hiring Ph.D. student interns for next summer!

The PSL is a group of about twenty researchers, mostly based in Santa Clara, California, just west of San Jose. The group’s charter is to invent new programming systems technologies that improve the performance and programmability of hardware. If you’re a Ph.D. student working on programming languages, compilers, runtime systems, and related hardware technologies, you might be a good fit for the lab.

There’s no official job posting for these internships¹, nor is there an official job description. Rather, as an intern you’d work with someone in the lab to come up with an internship project that suits your specific interests and background. Some projects and topics that PSL researchers have worked on in the last couple of years (sometimes in collaboration with interns) have included transactional memory, a vectorizing compiler for Haskell, adding parallelism to JavaScript, new techniques for debugging parallel programs, hardware support for record-and-replay debugging, and compiling irregular parallel programs to run on GPUs. This isn’t an exhaustive list, though, and I can’t predict what we’ll be working on next summer, so not being an expert in any of those things shouldn’t stop you from applying. Moreover, although one option for an internship is to work on an existing project, it’s even better if you can investigate some new idea that we otherwise don’t have cycles for.

If you’re a Ph.D. student and you’re interested in doing an internship in the PSL next summer, please contact me at my work email address (my first name dot my last name at intel dot com) and include your CV. You can also feel free to email me with any questions you have, and I’ll do my best to answer them.

One last thing. I didn’t do an internship here before joining the lab; indeed, for a lot of my Ph.D., I didn’t realize that such internships existed. It often seems that internships in groups like this are only publicized by word of mouth, or that the only way to get hired is by knowing someone in the lab. I’d like to make our intern hiring less in-groupy than that. Specifically, the problem is: how is some third-year grad student somewhere, someone who might not be particularly well-connected, or maybe can’t afford to attend lots of conferences, or maybe doesn’t go to a fancy top-however-many school that everyone thinks to recruit from – basically, me in 2011 – going to know that such opportunities exist? That’s really why I’m writing this post: for the benefit of someone who otherwise might not have known that the opportunity existed. If you are that me-three-years-ago person, then maybe we should talk.

1. At least, not yet; but if you’re interested, you shouldn’t wait for an official job posting to appear. ↩