Thu 18 Jun 2026 11:00 - 11:20 at Flatirons 3 - Domain-Specific Languages Chair(s): Qirun Zhang

Bounding volume hierarchies are ubiquitous acceleration structures in graphics, scientific computing, and data analytics. Their performance depends critically on data layout choices that affect cache utilization, memory bandwidth, and vectorization—increasingly dominant factors in modern computing. Yet, in most programming systems, these layout choices are hopelessly entangled with the traversal logic. This entanglement prevents developers from independently optimizing data layouts and algorithms across different contexts, perpetuating a false dichotomy between performance and portability. We introduce Scion, a domain-specific language and compiler for specifying the data layouts of bounding volume hierarchies independent of tree traversal algorithms. We show that Scion can express a broad spectrum of layout optimizations used in high-performance computing while remaining architecture-agnostic. We demonstrate empirically that Pareto-optimal layouts (along performance and memory footprint axes) vary across algorithms, architectures, and workload characteristics. Through systematic design exploration, we also identify a novel ray tracing layout that combines optimization techniques from prior work, achieving Pareto-optimality across diverse architectures and scenes.

Thu 18 Jun

Displayed time zone: Mountain Time (US & Canada) change

11:00 - 12:40
Domain-Specific LanguagesPLDI Research Papers at Flatirons 3
Chair(s): Qirun Zhang Georgia Institute of Technology
11:00
20m
Talk
Decoupling Data Layouts from Bounding Volume Hierarchies
PLDI Research Papers
Christophe Gyurgyik Stanford University, Alexander J Root Stanford University, Fredrik Kjolstad Stanford University
DOI
11:20
20m
Talk
Contextual Embeddings: Implementing Bound Variables through Instance Resolution
PLDI Research Papers
Samantha Frohlich University of Bristol, Jessica Foster University of Bristol, Alex Kavvos University of Bristol, Meng Wang University of Bristol
DOI Pre-print
11:40
20m
Talk
CoTenN: Constrained Optimization with Tensor Networks
PLDI Research Papers
Ritvik Sharma Stanford University, Cheng Peng Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Siddharth Dangwal University of Chicago, Sara Achour Stanford University
DOI
12:00
20m
Talk
Diagramming Program Values by Spatial Refinement
PLDI Research Papers
Siddhartha Prasad Brown University, Michael Tu Brown University, Karan Kashyap Brown University, Tim Nelson Brown University, Shriram Krishnamurthi Brown University
DOI
12:20
20m
Talk
Persistent Iterators with Value Semantics
PLDI Research Papers
Yihe Li National University of Singapore, Gregory J. Duck National University of Singapore
DOI