XPS: FULL: FP: Collaborative Research:Advancing autovectorization

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

Title: XPS:FULL:FP:Collaborative Research:Advancing autovectorization The goal of this project is to advance the state of the art in autovectorization. This is a technique applied by compilers to automatically transform computer programs so that they can take advantage of the vector devices found in most processors. Today, most compilers have autovectorization capabilities, but their effectiveness is limited. The intellectual merit of this project lies in its potential to advance an important and beautiful core area of computer science, compiler technology, by creating new techniques and extending our understanding of programming patterns, program analysis, and transformation techniques. Beyond computer science, the project's broader significance and importance is that its results aim at increasing the fraction of code segments that, without human intervention, make use of vector devices. The effect of this increase is the acceleration of computer programs and the reduction of the energy that they consume. Faster programs are of great importance in all application areas, but are particularly important in science and engineering where computing speed is an enabler of discoveries and better designs. The research strategy is to develop and evaluate a prototype autovectorizer based on the exploration of the space of equivalent versions of a program guided by an intelligent search engine. The space of equivalent versions is obtained with a source-to-source restructurer. A repository of codelets is planned in order to train the search engine so that it becomes capable of guiding the selection in the space of possibilities in order to identify a highly efficient version of the code.