Showing papers by "Charles E. Leiserson published in 2011"

The pochoir stencil compiler

Abstract: A stencil computation repeatedly updates each point of a d-dimensional grid as a function of itself and its near neighbors. Parallel cache-efficient stencil algorithms based on "trapezoidal decompositions" are known, but most programmers find them difficult to write. The Pochoir stencil compiler allows a programmer to write a simple specification of a stencil in a domain-specific stencil language embedded in C++ which the Pochoir compiler then translates into high-performing Cilk code that employs an efficient parallel cache-oblivious algorithm. Pochoir supports general d-dimensional stencils and handles both periodic and aperiodic boundary conditions in one unified algorithm. The Pochoir system provides a C++ template library that allows the user's stencil specification to be executed directly in C++ without the Pochoir compiler (albeit more slowly), which simplifies user debugging and greatly simplified the implementation of the Pochoir compiler itself. A host of stencil benchmarks run on a modern multicore machine demonstrates that Pochoir outperforms standard parallelloop implementations, typically running 2-10 times faster. The algorithm behind Pochoir improves on prior cache-efficient algorithms on multidimensional grids by making "hyperspace" cuts, which yield asymptotically more parallelism for the same cache efficiency.

Coding Stencil Computations Using the Pochoir Stencil-Specification Language

Abstract: Pochoir is a compiler for a domain-specific language embedded in C++ which produces excellent code from a simple specification of a desired stencil computation. Pochoir allows a wide variety of boundary conditions to be specified, and it automatically parallelizes and optimizes cache performance. Benchmarks of Pochoir-generated code demonstrate a performance advantage of 2‐10 times over standard parallel loop implementations. This paper describes the Pochoir specification language and shows how a wide range of stencil computations can be easily specified.