Liquid Metal: Blurring the Hardware/Software Boundary David F. Bacon IBM Research Abstract: The goal of the Liquid Metal project is to allow a heterogeneous system of conventional processors and reconfigurable hardware (FPGAs) to be programmed in a single language with transparent, dynamic execution across the aggregate computing resources -- to "JIT the hardware". Achieving this goal requires significant innovation across the entire system: language design, compiler technology, hardware synthesis, the run-time system, and hardware protocols. I will give an overview of the Liquid Metal language and the tool chain we have built, present some initial results, and describe challenges for the future. About the Speaker: David F. Bacon is a Research Staff Member at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center. He leads the Metronome project which which pioneered hard real-time garbage collection, opening the use of high-level languages like Java for time-critical systems in financial trading, aerospace, defense, video gaming, and telecommunications. Dr. Bacon's algorithms are included in most compilers and run-time systems for modern object-oriented languages, and his work on Thin Locks was selected as one of the most influential contributions in the 20 years of the Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) conference. His recent work focuses on high-level real-time programming, embedded systems, programming language design, and reconfigurable hardware. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley and his A.B. from Columbia University. He holds 7 patents and has served on numerous program committees including POPL, OOPSLA, ECOOP, LCTES, and EMSOFT. He is a member of the IBM Academy of Technology, Distinguished Scientist of the ACM, and is on the governing boards of ACM SIGPLAN and SIGBED.