The Software Analysis and Compilation Research Lab has changed in both name and composition since its creation in the summer 1992. The story starts with Dr. Lori Pollock and a group of 6 graduate students (Cindy Norris, James B. Fenwick, Mark Chu-Carroll, Chris Makowski, Jit Tan, Jeff Biesecker). The first meeting was June 3, 1992. We started as a seminar group, and in the tradition of ACM, named ourselves SIGCOMP, the Special Interest Group in the effective COMPilation and use of compile-time program analysis for parallel, vector, and sequential machines. Well, we just could not figure out how to shorten our name! We met weekly that summer, presenting and discussing recent conference and journal papers of interest to us, and having a great time getting to know each other.
The group remained rather small for several years, with only one faculty member in the area, until Fall 1997 when several new faculty joined the university. Gagan Agrawal joined the Department of Computer and Information Sciences as an Assistant Professor, while Guang Gao joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. With these new members, we broadened our scope and changed our name to SIGHPC - Special Interest Group in High Performance Computing. At this time, our group was still mostly a weekly seminar group of faculty and graduate students. This seminar group continues to be a weekly seminar, which graduate students register for each semester. However, in the spring 2000, we realized that with the increasing number of active research projects being conducted in this topic area here at the University of Delaware, we should officially establish the research group outside the SIGHPC seminar group, as it encompassed much more activity than the weekly seminar group. Thus, the creation of HiperSpace, named after the major research efforts in compiling and software tools for high performance computing.
Since 2004, the research has broadened beyond high performance computing to focus on software maintenance tools and testing along with compilation for parallel architectures. Thus, we renamed ourselves the Software Analysis and Compilation Research Lab in 2009.
The lab also regularly includes undergraduates who are learning the research process, especially in the summer and winter sessions.
There have been many fun times in this group–inside and outside the research work–and there will be many more!
