Who Am I?

My name is Corentin Ferry. Welcome to my homepage!

I am currently working as a Senior Software Development Engineer at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in Cologne, Germany.

My interests include FPGAs, High-Level Synthesis, RTL design, and compiler design.

My résumé (PDF)

Getting in touch

E-mail me at : corentin.ferry@cferr.fr, or connect with me on LinkedIn.

A few words on my Ph.D

I defended my Ph.D. on February 19, 2024 at Colorado State University (Fort Collins, Colorado); this was a co-tutelle degree with University of Rennes. I was supervised by Steven Derrien and Sanjay Rajopadhye.

I worked on optimizing memory accesses of FPGA accelerators by means of compilers. By and large, the HPC usage of FPGA chips tends to heavily use memory, to the point that fine-tuning memory accesses to reduce their latency becomes necessary. I focused on those memories located off the FPGA chip (the furthest and slowest), and made the case it is possible to have compilers discover a good placement of data (an allocation) that reduces the access latency by exposing locality and contiguity.

What enables us to come up with these allocations is program analysis: parallelizing compilers feature polyhedral analyzers that can give a closed-form (i.e. mathematical) representation of what the program is doing, in particular where and when it is accessing memory. Knowing this information, it becomes possible to predict the program's performance, and optimize its behavior with respect to memory accesses and the location of data.

Download: Dissertation | Slides

Computer Stuff

Not everyone can have their own passion as their job. Mine gives me this chance; I am particularly keen on low-level stuff happening within our machines. Below is a non-exhaustive list of my current interests. Note these are not related to my Ph.D.

• Systems-on-a-Chip. These beasts are everywhere: in our smartphones, tablets, fridges, cars, and whatever e-device you can think of probably has one. A large fraction of them is running Linux, oftentimes proprietary software bundled as a firmware. While I tend to praise Linux for its ability to run everywhere on theses SoCs, poor or hasty overlay software and firmware development is the cause of many security issues leading to exploits and data leaks. The last example in my head is those Blink security cameras whose firmware required a switch to TKIP, a broken encryption scheme on Wi-Fi networks... think security?
• The Linux kernel is a major interest to me. How it is developed and the rigor that its development has followed has no equivalent in the software world. It is understandable and minimal at the same time. I wish I could write as good a code. It'll come, one day.
• Computer imagery is another of my shallow interests. 2- and 3-dimensional rendering systems of a time where there were no popular Photoshop or Blender feed my curiosity: Quantel Paintboxes, Bosch FGS-4000 were way ahead of their time in the 1980s and 1990s and did such a good job! I'm sad they have now been surpassed by software running on general-purpose, soulless machines.
• IPv6 all the way! I am a supporter of a global IPv6 adoption and have got the Hurricane Electric IPv6 Sage certification level. The end-to-end addressing model of the Internet saves network builders many headaches. All my machines must have an IPv6 address so they are directly reachable, yet firewalled of course. A number of IT professionals still think of NAT as a security mechanism per se and do not learn about other features of firewalls... If you can reach ipv6.cferr.fr, you too have an IPv6-enabled provider!

Websites, in French

If you can read French, you might want to have a look at my blog on my stay in the USA and the site of the town of Verlans that I have been happily (albeit shallowly these years) maintaining since 2006.