Johannes De Fine Licht
Staff Compiler Engineer at NextSilicon
Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJohannes De Fine Licht is a staff compiler engineer with 12 years of experience building high-performance compiler infrastructure for next-generation HPC hardware. With a PhD from ETH Zurich under Prof. Torsten Hoefler, he specializes in productive programming for FPGAs and dataflow/reconfigurable architectures, and now architects an MLIR-based compiler at NextSilicon. His open-source contributions to LLVM and the DaCe project show deep hands-on expertise in MLIR/LLVM dialects, code generation, and memory-transfer optimizations for parallel workloads. He combines academic rigor in performance modeling and distributed computing with practical experience from industry internships at Microsoft, Xilinx, and production projects at CERN. Notably, he has tackled low-level compiler details—implementing ConstantLike interfaces and refactoring function attributes—to squeeze predictable performance from emerging HPC platforms. Based in Zurich, he brings a rare blend of research-led insight and production-grade engineering to compiler and accelerator stacks.
12 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Master's Degree Computer Science, Master's Degree Computer Science at Københavns Universitet - University of CopenhagenSwiss-European Mobility Programme Computer Science, Swiss-European Mobility Programme Computer Science at ETH Zürich
Danish, English, German
Stackoverflow
438reputation
10kreached
1answer
11questions
Github Skills (19)
c-language10
llvm10
mlr10
fpga10
cprogramming-language10
compiler-design9
code-generation9
opencl8
optimization8
systemverilog8
lifting6
graphviz6
haskell6
gmp6
mpfr6
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
spcl/dace
May 2019 - Jan 2022
DaCe - Data Centric Parallel Programming
Role in this project:
Back-end Engineer
Back-end EngineerContributions:370 reviews, 1151 commits, 192 PRs in 2 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Johannes contributed to the DaCe project by fixing a bug in the vectorized copy conversion test, and enhancing the capabilities of the Stencil Library. The contributions included modifications to improve the functionality of the memory transfer mechanism, including the addition of functions for setting the channels and adding the memory bank location specification.
cudahigh-level-synthesisparallelhigh-performance-computingvivado-hls
llvm/llvm-project
Jan 2023 - Jan 2023
The LLVM Project is a collection of modular and reusable compiler and toolchain technologies.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:16 reviews, 1 commit, 16 PRs in 1 day
Contributions summary:Johannes contributed to the LLVM project by implementing and modifying MLIR code, primarily focusing on the LLVM dialect. Their work included adding assertions for debugging, implementing the `ConstantLike` interface for `llvm.mlir.addressof`, and refactoring function attributes to promote `noinline`, `alwaysinline`, and `optnone`. They also addressed issues related to `memset` intrinsics, handling floats and constants, demonstrating a focus on compiler optimization and code generation.
compilerstechnologiesclangsubmittoolchain
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