PoCC

the Polyhedral Compiler Collection




[<< home] [news] [description] [documentation] [download] [installation] [performance results] [publications] [history] On development, version 1.0-rc2 available

News


Description

PoCC is a flexible source-to-source iterative and model-driven compiler, embedding most of the state-of-the-art tools for polyhedral compilation. The main features are:

  1. a full-flavored compiler, from C code to optimized C code, and to binary
  2. the state-of-the art techniques in polyhedral optimization (iterative search among legal schedules, powerful model-driven tiling and parallelization)
  3. a flexible platform to quickly prototype and develop optimizations leveraging the polyhedral model
  4. modular design, configuration files-oriented, ...

PoCC embeds powerful Free software for polyhedral compilation. This software is accessible from the main driver, and several IR conversion functions allows to communicate easily between passes of the compiler.

Communication: three groups are available for subscription


Documentation

Please note that the two following documents are highly preliminary, and incomplete. The documentation will be improved soon. In the meantime, don't hesitate to contact the author for any question.


Download


Installation

The stable mode of PoCC does not require any software beyond a working GNU toolchain and Perl.
Several other modes are available through the SVN version of PoCC (available on request). To use those other modes such as base, devel and irregular, some software is additionally required to build the development version of PoCC:

PoCC features several modes to configure the compiler. The default mode for the installer is stable. To change it and use a development mode, change the value of the POCC_VERSION variable at the beginning of the install.sh file.

The installation of PoCC is packaged in an installer script install.sh. PoCC is not aimed at being installed in a specific location on the system. Instead, append the pocc-1.0-rc2/bin directory to your PATH variable to use PoCC from any location.

$> tar xzf pocc-1.0-rc2.tar.gz
$> cd pocc-1.0-rc2
$> ./install.sh
$> export PATH=$PATH:`pwd`/bin

For a test run of the compiler:

$> pocc gemver.c
[PoCC] Compiling file: gemver.c
[PoCC] INFO: pass-thru compilation, no optimization enabled
[PoCC] Running Clan
[PoCC] Running Candl
[PoCC] Starting Codegen
[PoCC] Running CLooG
[CLooG] INFO: 3 dimensions (over 5) are scalar.
[PoCC] Output file is gemver.pocc.c.
[PoCC] All done.

To inspect the available options:

$> pocc -h
PoCC, the Polyhedral Compiler Collection, version 1.0-rc2.

Written by Louis-Noel Pouchet <louis-noel.pouchet@inria.fr>
Major contributions by Cedric Bastoul and Uday Bondhugula.

Available options for PoCC are: 
-h      --help                  Print this help
-v      --version               Print version information
-o      --output <arg>          Output file [filename.pocc.c]
        --bounded-ctxt          Parser: bound all global parameters >= -1
-d      --delete-files          Delete files previously generated by PoCC [off]

        --verbose               Verbose output [off]
        --quiet                 Minimal output [off]

-l      --letsee                Optimize with LetSee [off]
        --letsee-space <arg>    LetSee: search space: [precut], schedule
        --letsee-walk <arg>     LetSee: traversal heuristic:
                                [exhaust], random, skip, m1, dh, ga
        --letsee-dry-run        LetSee: Only generate source files [off]
        --letsee-normspace      LetSee: normalize search space [off]
        --letsee-bounds <arg>   LetSee: search space bounds [-1,1,-1,1,-1,1]
        --letsee-mode-m1 <arg>  LetSee: scheme for M1 traversal [i+p,i,0]
        --letsee-rtries <arg>   LetSee: number of random draws [50]
        --letsee-prune-precut   LetSee: prune precut space [off]
        --letsee-backtrack      LetSee: allow bactracking in schedule mode [off]

-p      --pluto                 Optimize with PLuTo [off]
        --pluto-parallel        PLuTo: OpenMP parallelization [off]
        --pluto-tile            PLuTo: polyhedral tiling [off]
        --pluto-l2tile          PLuTo: perform L2 tiling [off]
        --pluto-fuse <arg>      PLuTo: fusion heuristic:
                                maxfuse, [smartfuse], nofuse
        --pluto-unroll          PLuTo: unroll loops [off]
        --pluto-ufactor <arg>   PLuTo: unrolling factor [4]
        --pluto-polyunroll      PLuTo: polyhedral unrolling [off]
        --pluto-prevector       PLuTo: perform prevectorization [off]
        --pluto-multipipe       PLuTo: multipipe [off]
        --pluto-rar             PLuTo: consider RAR dependences [off]
        --pluto-lastwriter      PLuTo: perform lastwriter dep. simp. [off]
        --pluto-scalpriv        PLuTo: perform scalar privatization [off]
        --pluto-bee             PLuTo: use Bee [off]
        --pluto-quiet           PLuTo: be quiet [off]
        --pluto-ft              PLuTo: ft [off]
        --pluto-lt              PLuTo: lt [off]

-n      --no-codegen            Do not generate code [off]
        --cloog-cloogf <arg>    CLooG: first level to scan [1]
        --cloog-cloogl <arg>    CLooG: last level to scan [-1]
        --codegen-timercode     Codegen: insert timer code [off]
        --codegen-timer-asm     Codegen: insert ASM timer code [off]
        --codegen-timer-papi    Codegen: insert PAPI timer code [off]

-c      --compile               Compile program with C compiler [off]
        --compile-cmd <arg>     Compilation command [gcc -O3 -lm]
        --prog-timeout <arg>    Timeout for compilation and execution, in second
                                [unlimited]

To run iterative search among possible precuts, with tiling and parallelization enabled:

$> pocc --letsee --pluto-tile --pluto-parallel --codegen-timercode --verbose gemver.c
[...]


Performance Results

We experimented on three high-end machines: a 4-socket Intel hexa-core Xeon E7450 (Dunnington) at 2.4GHz with 64 GB of memory (24 cores, 24 hardware threads), a 4-socket AMD quad-core Opteron 8380 (Shanghai) at 2.50GHz (16 cores, 16 hardware threads) with 64 GB of memory, and an 2-socket IBM dual-core Power5+ at 1.65GHz (4 cores, 8 hardware threads) with 16 GB of memory.

All systems were running Linux 2.6.x. We used Intel ICC 10.0 with options -fast -parallel -openmp referred to as icc-par, and with -fast referred to as icc-nopar, GCC 4.3.3 with options -O3 -msse3 -fopenmp as gcc, and IBM/XLC 10.1 compiled for Power5 with options -O3 -qhot=nosimd -qsmp -qthreaded referred to as xlc-par, and -O3 -qhot=nosimd referred as xlc-nopar. We report the performance of the precut iterative compilation mode of PoCC as iter-xx when used on top of the xx compiler. Precut search is enabled in PoCC with options --letsee-space precut, and tiling and parallelization for precuts with --pluto-tile --pluto-parallel.

We consider 8 benchmarks, typical from compute-intensive sequences of algebra operations. atax, bicg and gemver are compositions of BLAS operations, ludcmp solves simultaneous linear equations by LU decomposition, advect3d is an advection kernel for weather modeling and doitgen is an in-place 3D-2D matrix product. correl creates a correlation matrix, and varcovar creates a variance-covariance matrix, both are used in Principal Component Analysis in the StatLib library. The time to compute the space, pick a candidate and compute a full transformation is negligible with respect to the compilation and execution time of the tested versions. In our experiments, the full compilation process takes a few seconds for the smaller benchmarks, and up to about 1 minute for correl on Xeon.

For doitgen, correl and varcovar, three compute-bound benchmarks, our technique exposes a program with a significant parallel speedup of up to 112x on the Opteron machine. Our optimization technique goes far beyond parallelizing programs, and for these benchmarks locality and vectorization improvements were achieved by our framework. For advect3d, atax, bicg, and gemver we also observe a significant speedup, but this is limited by memory bandwidth as these benchmarks are memory-bound. Yet, we are able to achieve a solid performance improvement for those benchmarks over the native compilers, of up to 3.8x for atax on the Xeon machine and 5x for advect3d on the Opteron machine. For ludcmp, although parallelism was exposed, the speedup remains limited as the program offers little opportunity for high-level optimizations. Yet, our technique outperforms the native compiler, by a factor up to 2x on the Xeon machine.

For the Xeon and Opteron machines, the iterative process outperforms ICC 10 with auto-parallelization, with a factor between 1.2x for gemver on Intel to 15.3x for doitgen. For both of these kernels, we also compared with an implementation using Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL) 10.0 and AMD Core Math Library (ACML) 4.1.0 for the Xeon and Opteron machines respectively, and we obtain a speedup of 1.5x to 3x over these vendor libraries.

For varcovar, our technique outperforms the native compiler by a factor up to 15x. Although maximal fusion significantly improved performance, the best iteratively found fusion structure allows for a much better improvement, up to 1.75x better. Maximal fusion is also outperformed for all but ludcmp and doitgen for some machines only. This highlights the power of the method to discover an efficient balance between parallelism (both coarse-grain and fine-grain) and locality.

On the Power5+ machine, on all but advect3d the iterative process outperforms XLC with auto-parallelization, by a factor between 1.1x for atax to 21x for varcovar.

Machine

Speedup for Xeon, Opteron and Power5+ processors over the best single-threaded version

Performance improvement over maximal fusion, and over the best reference auto-parallelizing compiler

4-sockets Intel Dunnington Xeon E7450
24 H/W threads
4-sockets AMD Shangai Opteron 8380
16 H/W threads
2-sockets IBM dual-core Power5+
8 H/W threads


Publications involving PoCC

    In conferences

  1. Eunjung Park, Louis-Noël Pouchet, John Cavazos and P. Sadayappan. Predictive Modeling in a Polyhedral Optimization Space. In 9th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO'11), Chamonix, France, April 2011. To appear.
    [bibtex-entry] [pdf] [slides]
  2. Louis-Noël Pouchet, Uday Bondhugula, Cédric Bastoul, Albert Cohen, J. Ramanujam, P. Sadayappan and Nicolas Vasilache. Loop Transformations: Convexity, Pruning and Optimization. In 38th ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL'11), Austin, TX, January 2011.
    [bibtex-entry] [pdf] [slides]
  3. Louis-Noël Pouchet, Uday Bondhugula, Albert Cohen, Cédric Bastoul, J. Ramanujam, P. Sadayappan. Combined Iterative and Model-driven Optimization in an Automatic Parallelization Framework. In Conference on Supercomputing (SC'2010), New Orleans, LA, November 2010.
    [bibtex-entry] [pdf] [slides]
  4. Mohamed-Walid Benabderrahmane, Louis-Noël Pouchet, Albert Cohen, Cédric Bastoul. The Polyhedral Model Is More Widely Applicable Than You Think. In ETAPS International Conference on Compiler Construction (CC'2010), pp 283--303, Springer Verlag, Paphos, Cyprus, March 2010.
    [bibtex-entry] [pdf] [slides]
  5. Research reports

  6. Louis-Noël Pouchet, Uday Bondhugula, Cédric Bastoul, Albert Cohen, J. Ramanujam and P. Sadayappan. Hybrid Iterative and Model-Driven Optimization in the Polyhedral Model. In INRIA Research Report 6962, June 2009.
    [bibtex-entry] [pdf]
  7. Mohamed-Walid Benabderrahmane, Cédric Bastoul, Louis-Noël Pouchet and Albert Cohen. A Conservative Approach to Handle Full Functions in the Polyhedral Model. In INRIA Research Report 6814, January 2009.
    [bibtex-entry] [pdf]
  8. In Journals

  9. H. Munk, E. Ayguadé, C. Bastoul, P. Carpenter, Z. Chamski, A. Cohen, M. Cornero, P. Dumont, M. Duranton, M. Fellahi, R. Ferrer, R. Ladelsky, M. Lindwer, X. Martorell, C. Miranda, D. Nuzman, A. Ornstein, A. Pop, S. Pop, L.-N. Pouchet, A. Ramírez, D. Rodenas, E. Rohou, I. Rosen, U. Shvadron, K. Trifunovic, and A. Zaks. ACOTES project: Advanced compiler technologies for embedded streaming. In International Journal of Parallel Programming (IJPP), 2010. Special issue on European HiPEAC network of excellence member’s projects.
    [bibtex-entry] [pdf]
  10. Thesis

  11. Louis-Noël Pouchet. Iterative Optimization in the Polyhedral Model. Ph.D (University of Paris-Sud XI), Orsay, France, January 2010.
    [bibtex-entry] [pdf] [slides]


PoCC was supported by the EU-funded ACOTES project (European Union's Sixth Framework IST together with NXP, STMicroelectronics, Nokia, INRIA, IBM Haifa Research Lab and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya)

Advanced Compiler Technologies for Embedded Streaming:


History

4/15/2010: Second release candidate of pocc-1.0

1/21/2010: First release candidate of pocc-1.0 11/07/2009: 3rd Beta release of pocc-1.0 11/07/2009: 3rd Beta release of pocc-1.0 08/15/2009: 2nd Beta release of pocc-1.0 06/12/2009: Beta release of pocc-1.0