CAREER: Compilation Techniques for Customizing Software Libraries

职业：定制软件库的编译技术

• 批准号: 9984660
• 负责人: Calvin Lin
• 金额: $ 31.48万
• 依托单位: University of Texas at Austin
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2000
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2000-03-01 至 2005-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9984660&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Compilation; Techniques; Customizing; Software

This project presents a vision for satisfying the world's demand for software: increase programmer productivity by building programs out of large software components that can provide powerful abstractions, that can be seamlessly integrated with other components, and that can easily conform to different execution environments. Thousands of software libraries already exist to provide such components, but most fall far short of the goal of seamless efficiency on all platforms. This project will define and experimentally evaluate a new approach for tuning libraries using both domain-specific and machine-specific compiler optimizations. The key to the approach is an annotation language that conveys three types of information: library semantics, machine characteristics, and information about how library components will be composed. This advances other library techniques by encapsulating and exploiting domain-specific information to reap benefits of programming abstractions without incurring their usual efficiency costs.The project will focus on three important opportunities for improving performance and portability: the extension of conventional scalar optimizations to library optimizations, the optimization of sequences of library calls, and methods for customizing libraries on different machines. The methods and results will be validated in experiments using the PLAPACK dense linear algebra library, MPICH message-passing library, and object-oriented languages such as Java. Research results expected from this project include a deeper understanding of the use of domain- and machine-specific information in the compilation process, new optimizations based on that information, and a compiler and language that can be used in testing the ideas. Just as this research seeks to improve the flow of information across interfaces, the project's educational component will attempt to bridge interfaces across disciplines and communities of the student population by creating a "Fundamentals of Computer Science" course for the institution's interdisciplinary Computational and Applied Mathematics program.

该项目提出了满足世界软件需求的愿景：通过从大型软件组件构建程序来提高程序员的生产力，这些大型软件组件可以提供强大的抽象，可以与其他组件无缝集成，并且可以很容易地符合不同的执行环境。已经存在数千个软件库来提供此类组件，但大多数远未达到在所有平台上实现无缝效率的目标。该项目将定义并实验评估一种使用特定于域和特定于计算机的编译器优化来调优库的新方法。这种方法的关键是一种可以传递三种类型信息的注释语言：库语义、机器特征和有关如何合成库组件的信息。这通过封装和利用特定于领域的信息来促进其他库技术的发展，从而在不产生通常的效率成本的情况下获得编程抽象的好处。该项目将专注于提高性能和可移植性的三个重要机会：将传统的标量优化扩展到库优化，库调用序列的优化，以及在不同机器上定制库的方法。这些方法和结果将通过使用PLAPACK稠密线性代数库、MPICH消息传递库和Java等面向对象语言在实验中得到验证。预计该项目的研究结果包括对编译过程中特定于域和计算机的信息的使用有更深入的了解，基于该信息的新优化，以及可用于测试这些想法的编译器和语言。就像这项研究试图改善界面上的信息流动一样，该项目的教育部分将试图通过为该机构的跨学科计算和应用数学项目创建一门“计算机科学基础”课程，在学生群体的学科和社区之间架起一座桥梁。