Open Research Compiler (ORC) for the Itanium Processor Family

In conjunction with MICRO-34

Austin, Texas

December 1, 2001

The Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC) architecture, exemplified by the Itanium Processor Family (IPF), has led to an exciting arena for the compiler and architecture research. To enable and encourage research activities on IPF, Intel Corp. in collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences plans to deliver an open-source IPF compiler, Open Research Compiler (ORC), around Q4 of 2001. The goal of ORC is to provide a flexible and robust compiler infrastructure to the research community so that researchers can focus their efforts on solving their critical issues without spending substantial resources on infrastructure work. ORC is based on an advanced and product-quality open source compiler, Pro64, which include many optimization components, such as inter-procedural analysis and optimizations, loop-nest optimizations, and machine-independent and -dependent optimizations.

ORC has added a number of novel research infrastructure features and state-of-the-art IPF optimizations. The infrastructure features include region-based optimization framework, parameterized machine model, and support for a rich set of profiling feedback. The newly designed IPF-specific optimizations include control and data speculation with recovery code generation, if-conversion, predicate analysis to support predicate-aware data flow analysis, and instruction scheduling integrated with template selection. ORC combined with an IPF performance simulator, such as one produced by the open source Liberty Simulator Environment from the Princeton University, provides a complete framework to study various architecture and compilation issues on EPIC. This tutorial will be the first public forum to introduce the technical features in ORC.

Planned outline of the tutorial: 1. Overview of ORC

2. Infrastructure features to enable compiler research 3. Advanced optimizations for features on Itanium Processor Family (IPF) 4. Case study 5. Release and future plan

Tutorial Organizers:

Roy Ju (MRL, Intel) [email protected]
Sun Chan (MRL, Intel) [email protected]
Chengyong Wu (ICT, CAS) [email protected]
 

Bios:

Roy D.C. Ju is a senior researcher in the Programming System Lab in the Microprocessor Research Labs, Intel Corp. He is currently the compiler architect of an IA-64 open source research compiler, which aims at providing an infrastructure for compiler and architecture research on IA-64 to the research and open source communities. His primary research interests include compiler optimization, optimization for memory hierarchy, software power management, program analysis, computer architecture, and parallel processing. Prior to joining in Intel, he was with the Hewlett-Packard Company from 1994 to 1999, and he was a project lead in designing and developing an optimizing compiler for IA-64. He worked at IBM from 1992 to 1994 in developing a then state-of-the-art Fortran 90 optimizing compiler. He received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University in 1984. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1988 and 1992, respectively. He currently holds 6 U.S. patents and has published more than 30 journal and conference papers in various areas, including array language optimizations, compilation for instruction-level parallelism, cache optimization, coarse-grained parallelization, etc. He has served on the program committees of a number of conferences, such as MICRO-33 and PLDI 2001.

Sun C. Chan is the manager of the open source research compiler project in the Microprocessor Research Labs, Intel Corp. His primary research interests include large-scale software engineering, compiler scalar optimization, both in the global and inter-procedural areas, and instruction level parallelism. Prior to joining Intel, he was with SGI where he was a manager of global optimizer and interprocedural optimizer. He is also the coordinator and architect of the open source Pro64 compiler. Before SGI, he was a project lead at Mips working on global scheduling and optimization of dynamic shared objects. He received his M.S. degree in Computer Science from Purdue University in 1981. He holds 10 U.S. patents with several more pending and has published in journal and conference papers in various areas, including inter-procedural analysis, global optimization and instruction-level parallelism. He is also interested in engaging university researchers in compiler and architecture research.

Chengyong Wu received the B.S. degree in Mathematics from the Fudan University, Shanghai, P. R. China, in 1991 and the M.S. degree in Computer Engineering from the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Beijing, P. R. China, in 1996 and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Sciences from the Institute of Computing Technology, Beijing, P. R. China, in 2000. Since March 2000, he has been with the Advanced Compiler Technology Lab at the Division of Computer Systems, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. His research interests include instruction-level-parallelism, optimization, and common compiler infrastructure. He is currently working in a project of developing an IPF open source research compiler.