Automatic Matching of Legacy Code to Heterogeneous APIs: An Idiomatic Approach

Ginsbach, P., Remmelg, T., Steuwer, M. , Bodin, B., Dubach, C. and O’Boyle, M. F.P. (2018) Automatic Matching of Legacy Code to Heterogeneous APIs: An Idiomatic Approach. In: 23rd ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS'18), Williamsburg, VA, USA, 24-28 Mar 2018, pp. 139-153. ISBN 9781450349116 (doi: 10.1145/3173162.3173182)

Abstract

Heterogeneous accelerators often disappoint. They provide the prospect of great performance, but only deliver it when using vendor specific optimized libraries or domain specific languages. This requires considerable legacy code modifications, hindering the adoption of heterogeneous computing. This paper develops a novel approach to automatically detect opportunities for accelerator exploitation. We focus on calculations that are well supported by established APIs: sparse and dense linear algebra, stencil codes and generalized reductions and histograms. We call them idioms and use a custom constraint-based Idiom Description Language (IDL) to discover them within user code. Detected idioms are then mapped to BLAS libraries, cuSPARSE and clSPARSE and two DSLs: Halide and Lift. We implemented the approach in LLVM and evaluated it on the NAS and Parboil sequential C/C++ benchmarks, where we detect 60 idiom instances. In those cases where idioms are a significant part of the sequential execution time, we generate code that achieves 1.26× to over 20× speedup on integrated and external GPUs.

• Item Type: Conference Proceedings
• Additional Information: This work was supported in part by the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Pervasive Parallelism, funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (grant EP/L01503X/1) and the University of Edinburgh. Some of the hardware used for this research was donated by the NVIDIA Corporation.
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Steuwer, Dr Michel
• Authors: Ginsbach, P., Remmelg, T., Steuwer, M., Bodin, B., Dubach, C., and O’Boyle, M. F.P.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
• ISSN: 0362-1340
• ISBN: 9781450349116
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2018 The Authors
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher