An Extensible, Higher-Order Intermediate Representation

Date

Oct 10, 2022 - Oct 11, 2022

Time

11:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Speaker

Prof. Dr. Roland Leißa

Affiliation

University of Mannheim

Language

en

Main Topic

Informatik

Description

<p style="text-align: left;">Classic compilers that argue about and optimize low-level program<br>representations are not sufficient to tackle many modern computationally<br>expensive applications such as image processing, machine learning, or<br>simulation software. Optimizations should happen at a much higher-level<br>that actually understand the primitive operations of the specific<br>application domain. In addition, we would like to generate<br>high-performance code for various highly parallel devices like multicore<br>CPUs with SIMD instructions or GPUs.<br><br>Compilers for domain-specific languages (DSLs) such as Halide or XLA<br>exactly fulfill these requirements. However, DSL compilers reinvent the<br>wheel over and over again as standard optimizations, code generators,<br>and general infrastructure & boilerplate code must be reimplemented for<br>each application domain.<br><br>This talk presents Thorin, an extensible, higher-order intermediate<br>representation. At its core, Thorin is a pure type system and, hence, a<br>form of a typed lambda calculus. Users can add new operations - called<br>axioms - simply by declaring them. These axioms may be opaque functions,<br>type operators, or any other entity with a possibly polymorphic and/or<br>dependent type. This way users can extend Thorin with new operations at<br>any low or high level and bundle them in a so-called dialect. A plugin<br>architecture allows to define new optimizations that interact with<br>axioms and other optimizations defined in other dialects in the most<br>optimal way without suffering from the infamous phase-ordering problem.<br><br></p>

Last modified: Oct 10, 2022, 12:10:06 AM