I-Corps: Optimized Compiler Applications

这一i-Corps项目的广泛影响/商业潜力预计将增强计算机软件开发的性能、生产率和正确性保证，特别是在科学计算、游戏、图形/地图处理、数据挖掘、信号处理和机器学习等领域的计算或数据密集型软件。该项目有可能在各种硬件平台上加速和扩展这些类型的应用程序。通过自动生成用于不同平台的各种实现变体，同时允许将软件的单个易于维护的版本用作不同实现变体的来源，增强了这些应用程序的正确性保证。这些自动改进的应用程序反过来可以通过更大规模的科学模拟和机器学习来实现更好的知识发现，并通过更好的GPS路由和自然语言处理实现来潜在地改善人们的日常生活质量。这个i-Corps项目将探索一个系统的商业可行性，该系统可以在各种不同的硬件平台上自动生成高效的计算机软件实现变体。图形用户界面用于允许用户交互地指定所需的应用程序特征、提供关于应用程序源代码的知识以及选择适当的硬件平台。该项目的独特之处在于其界面支持软件开发人员之间的交互通信、编译器优化以及针对不同平台的优化性能调整。虽然现有最先进的编译器主要将编译器视为针对单个所需硬件平台优化给定软件应用程序的黑匣子，但该项目将编译器技术打包为供开发人员交互使用的优化工具集集合，以便可以在更细粒度的级别应用优化，特别定制以适应每个应用程序的需求，并更好地调整以利用硬件平台的不同功能。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is expected to enhance the performance, productivity, and correctness assurance of computer software development, particularly for computation or data intensive software in areas such as scientific computing, gaming, graph/map processing, data mining, signal processing, and machine learning. The project has potential to speed and scale these types of applications on a variety of hardware platforms. The correctness assurance of these applications is enhances by having a variety of implementation variants for different platforms automatically generated, while allowing a single easy-to-maintain version of the software being used as the source for the different implementation variants. These "automatically improved" applications can, in turn, enable better knowledge discovery through larger-scale scientific simulations and machine learning, and potentially improve the quality of people's daily lives through better GPS routing and natural language processing implementations.This I-Corps project will explore the commercial viability of a system that automatically produces efficient implementation variants of computer software on a variety of different hardware platforms. A graphical user interface is used to permit users to interactively specify the desired application features, provide knowledge about the application source code, and select the appropriate hardware platforms. The project is unique in its interface for supporting interactive communications among software developers, compiler optimizations, and performance tuning of optimizations for varying platforms. While the existing state-of-the-art largely treats compilers as black boxes that optimize a given software application for a single desired hardware platform, this project packages compiler technologies as a collection of optimization tool sets to be used interactively by developers so that optimizations can be applied at a much finer-grained level, specially customized to suit the needs of each application, and better tuned to exploit the varying capabilities of hardware platforms.