Leveraging Semantics Attached to Function Calls to Isolate Applications from Hardware

Sean Halle (1, 2) , Albert Cohen (1)

1 ALCHEMY - Architectures, Languages and Compilers to Harness the End of Moore Years
2 UCSC - Jack Baskin School of Engineering

To improve performance, computer systems are forcing more microarchitectural and parallel hardware details to be directly exploited by application programmers, exposing limitations in existing compiler and OS infras- tructure, which is failing to maintain the software productivity of the past. In this paper we propose a prag- matic approach, motivated by our experience with BLIS [11], for building applications that tolerate changing hardware, delivering good performance from the same source across diverse parallel targets. Applications are coded in terms of generic parallel patterns using a “piggy back” language, embedded into a base sequential lan- uage by attaching semantics to function calls. Our approach allows programmers to leverage multiple pro- cessor-specific and domain-specific toolchains encapsulated in specialization modules, which extract their input information from the semantics of the function calls, creating an isolation layer bewteen application and target platforms. Developers use existing sequential development tools and languages to code and debug, performing specialization as a separate step when shipping the code. We show this approach can successfully specialize a single source to diverse and evolving heterogeneous multi-core targets and enable aggressive compiler optimiza- tions.

Domaines: Langage de programmation [cs.PL]

Sean Halle, Albert Cohen. Leveraging Semantics Attached to Function Calls to Isolate Applications from Hardware. 2nd USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Parallelism (HotPar'10), Jun 2010, Berkeley, United States. ⟨inria-00551514⟩