Compiler

About: Compiler is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 26362 publications have been published within this topic receiving 578585 citations. The topic is also known as: code compiler & Compiler.

Optimizing Compilers for Modern Architectures: A Dependence-based Approach

Abstract: Modern computer architectures designed with high-performance microprocessors offer tremendous potential gains in performance over previous designs. Yet their very complexity makes it increasingly difficult to produce efficient code and to realize their full potential. This landmark text from two leaders in the field focuses on the pivotal role that compilers can play in addressing this critical issue. The basis for all the methods presented in this book is data dependence, a fundamental compiler analysis tool for optimizing programs on high-performance microprocessors and parallel architectures. It enables compiler designers to write compilers that automatically transform simple, sequential programs into forms that can exploit special features of these modern architectures. The text provides a broad introduction to data dependence, to the many transformation strategies it supports, and to its applications to important optimization problems such as parallelization, compiler memory hierarchy management, and instruction scheduling. The authors demonstrate the importance and wide applicability of dependence-based compiler optimizations and give the compiler writer the basics needed to understand and implement them. They also offer cookbook explanations for transforming applications by hand to computational scientists and engineers who are driven to obtain the best possible performance of their complex applications.

Halide: a language and compiler for optimizing parallelism, locality, and recomputation in image processing pipelines

Abstract: Image processing pipelines combine the challenges of stencil computations and stream programs. They are composed of large graphs of different stencil stages, as well as complex reductions, and stages with global or data-dependent access patterns. Because of their complex structure, the performance difference between a naive implementation of a pipeline and an optimized one is often an order of magnitude. Efficient implementations require optimization of both parallelism and locality, but due to the nature of stencils, there is a fundamental tension between parallelism, locality, and introducing redundant recomputation of shared values.We present a systematic model of the tradeoff space fundamental to stencil pipelines, a schedule representation which describes concrete points in this space for each stage in an image processing pipeline, and an optimizing compiler for the Halide image processing language that synthesizes high performance implementations from a Halide algorithm and a schedule. Combining this compiler with stochastic search over the space of schedules enables terse, composable programs to achieve state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of real image processing pipelines, and across different hardware architectures, including multicores with SIMD, and heterogeneous CPU+GPU execution. From simple Halide programs written in a few hours, we demonstrate performance up to 5x faster than hand-tuned C, intrinsics, and CUDA implementations optimized by experts over weeks or months, for image processing applications beyond the reach of past automatic compilers.

Numba: a LLVM-based Python JIT compiler

Abstract: Dynamic, interpreted languages, like Python, are attractive for domain-experts and scientists experimenting with new ideas. However, the performance of the interpreter is often a barrier when scaling to larger data sets. This paper presents a just-in-time compiler for Python that focuses in scientific and array-oriented computing. Starting with the simple syntax of Python, Numba compiles a subset of the language into efficient machine code that is comparable in performance to a traditional compiled language. In addition, we share our experience in building a JIT compiler using LLVM[1].

The spec# programming system: an overview

Abstract: The Spec# programming system is a new attempt at a more cost effective way to develop and maintain high-quality software. This paper describes the goals and architecture of the Spec# programming system, consisting of the object-oriented Spec# programming language, the Spec# compiler, and the Boogie static program verifier. The language includes constructs for writing specifications that capture programmer intentions about how methods and data are to be used, the compiler emits run-time checks to enforce these specifications, and the verifier can check the consistency between a program and its specifications.