GCC Interactive Compilation Interface development

["Grigori Fursin" <gfursin at gmail dot com>]

Dear all,

Just wanted to announce that we are working
on the GCC Interactive Compilation Interface to enable 
automatic tuning of optimization heuristic. This interface
is used in HiPEAC, MilePost, SARC and GCCC projects.

A website with latest patches, software, forums, mailing lists,
publications is available here: 

http://gcc-ici.sourceforge.net

Current prototype of GCC-ICI has an ability to reorder compiler 
optimization phases and fine-tune several transformations.
We are currently working on the following issues: 
 
* incrementally modifying Tree-SSA to support dynamic pass reordering  
* splitting analysis and optimization code  
* extracting program features 
* adding support for fine-grain tuning of most of the GCC optimizations  
* developing a component model for passes to enable dynamic linking of external optimization plugins

* developing a scripting language inside GCC to simplify and automatize transformations &
optimization process 

We presented our preliminary work at the SMART'07 workshop and GCC HiPEAC Tutorial
where I had a chat with Diego Novillo et al about further GCC-ICI developments.
We now plan to have an open discussion at the GCC-ICI forum about further 
developments and will be happy for any comments and suggestions.

Here is the formal motivation for our research and developments:

Current innovations in science and industry demand ever-increasing
computing resources while placing strict requirements on system
performance, power consumption, code size, response, reliability,
portability and design time. However compilers often fail to deliver
satisfactory levels of performance on modern processors, due to
rapidly evolving hardware, lack/cost of expert resources, fixed and
black-box optimization heuristics, simplistic hardware models,
inability to fine-tune the application of transformations, and highly
dynamic behavior of the system.

Recently, we started developing an Interactive Compilation Interface
(ICI) to connect external optimization drivers to the GCC. This
interface is meant to facilitate the prototyping and evaluation of
iterative optimization, fine-grain customization and design-space
exploration strategies. The early design to enable non-intrusive
feature extraction and meddling with heuristic's decisions was
presented at the SMART'07 workshop. Currently, we are working on a 
more advanced design, incrementally modifying Tree-SSA to support dynamic
pass reordering, structured split of analysis and optimization code,
and a component model for passes to enable dynamic linking of external
optimization plugins. We believe these modification will simplify the
tuning process of new optimization heuristics and will eventually
simplify the whole compiler design where compiler heuristics will be
learned automatically, continuously and transparently for a user using
statistical and machine learning techniques.

Looking forward to your input,
Grigori Fursin

=====================================
Grigori Fursin, PhD
Research Fellow, INRIA Futurs, France
http://fursin.net/research_desc.html