CTools:ICI

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Revision as of 13:12, 2 September 2009

	Interactive Compilation Interface
	*Enabling Collaborative Interactive Research Compilers*

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The Interactive Compilation Interface (or 'ICI' for short) is a plugin system with a high-level compiler-independent and low-level compiler-dependent API to transform current compilers into collaborative open modular interactive toolsets. The ICI framework acts as a "middleware" interface between the compiler and the user-definable plugins. It opens up and reuses the production-quality compiler infrastructure to enable program analysis and instrumentation, fine-grain program optimizations, simple prototyping of new development and research ideas while avoiding building new compilation tools from scratch. For example, it is used in MILEPOST GCC to automate compiler and architecture design and program optimizations based on statistical analysis and machine learning. It should enable universal self-tuning compilers adaptable to heterogeneous, reconfigurable, multi-core architectures ranging from supercomputers to embedded systems.

Background:

Current development - source code repository, bug reports, discussions

ICI Downloads / Plugin repository

Documentation and API - functionality, API reference guide, features, FAQ

User suggestions and feedback

Projects to extend ICI, plugins and compilers - more than 15 projects currently

ICI is an open collaborative community-driven project. You are welcome to join and participate in developments, discussions, provide feedback or suggestions to extend ICI or add new features. We develop ICI for GCC at the moment, but trying to keep it compiler independent in case someone would like to port it to other compilers to extend collaborative tools.

News

2009.September.1 - The documentation of MILEPOST GCC/GCC ICI extensions by Yuanjie and Liang during GSOC'09 program is now available: Function cloning and program instrumentation and Fine grain program tuning. We would like to fully test and sync these developments with mainline GCC within next month or two.

2009.August.05 - The colleagues from the UNIDAPT Group started investigating the use of cTuning/MILEPOST technology and the UNIDAPT framework to predict good optimization and parallelization schemes for hybrid heterogeneous CPU/GPU-like architectures together with CAPS Entreprise based on run-time adaptation and profiling, empirical iterative compilation, statistical analysis, machine learning, program and dataset features and run-time decision trees (FT2009, LCWP2009, Fur2009, JGVP2009, TWFP2009, FMTP2008, LFF2007, FCOP2005). They plan to add new optimization cases to the Collective Optimization Database in Autumn, 2009.

2009.July.27 - The paper "Portable Compiler Optimization Across Embedded Programs and Microarchitectures using Machine Learning" (DJBP2009) has been accepted for the 42nd IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO). The research has been led by the colleagues from the University of Edinburgh - congratulations!

2009.July.22 - Grigori Fursin is a co-organizer of SMART'10 and GROW'10 workshops that will be co-located with HiPEAC'10 conference in Pisa, Italy at the end of January, 2009. You are warmly invited to submit your novel research results and developments to our workshops! At the websites of these workshops you can find all information about topics, PC, deadlines and submission procedures.

2009.July.15 - New optimization cases to improve execution time, code size and compilation time are now available in Collective Optimization Database for cBench, EEMBC, SPEC and other applications with multiple datasets using MILEPOST GCC 4.4.0 and 2 architectures (Intel and AMD) from GRID5000 (infrastructure for large scale parallel and distributed computing research).

2009.July.08 - The preprint of a paper "Collective Tuning Initiative: automating and accelerating development and optimization of computing systems" describing cTuning infrastructure is now available online (Fur2009).

2009.June.29 - Stable MILEPOST GCC 4.4.0 has been released. Follow further community developments at cTuning GCC ICI page and cTuning development mailing list.
Next, we plan to use MILEPOST/cTuning technology to enable realistic adaptive parallelization, data partitioning and scheduling for heterogeneous multi-core systems using statistical and machine learning techniques.

2009.June.26 - The pdf of the paper that describes Collective Tuning Infrastructure and cTuning concept (presented at the GCC Summit'09) will be available in a few weeks here.
2009.June.17 - We participated in discussions to include plugin system similar to ICI to mainline GCC for a long time and finally GCC 4.5 will feature a low-level plugin system. We are now synchronizing high-level ICI/MILEPOST with the mainline to be able to reuse all our available plugins. We also develop several new plugins within Google Summer of Code'2009 to enable XML representation of the compilation flow, fine-grain program optimizations and instrumentation, automatic tuning of optimization heuristic based on machine learning, and function-level run-time adaptation. Comparison of GCC low-level and high-level ICI plugins is available here. The ICI development and discussions mailing list is available here.
2009.June.01 - After nearly 1 year of developments we released/updated all our open-source collaborative R&D tools:
- fully redesigned and documented Interactive Compilation Interface v2.0 for GCC 4.4.0 synchronized with the official plugin GCC branch - transforming compilers into plugin-enabled research toolsets
- MILEPOST GCC 4.4.0 pre-release version at SVN - automating program optimization and compiler optimization heuristic tuning using machine learning
- Continuous Collective Compilation Framework v2.0 - enabling automatic collaborative program optimization based on statistical and machine learning techniques
- Collective Benchmark/MiDataSets v1.0 - enabling realistic program optimization research and benchmarking using multiple open-source programs/datasets.
  
  We also updated Collective Optimization Database with various optimization cases for Intel and AMD processors and comparison of different compilers including GCC, LLVM, Open64, Intel, etc - enabling sharing and reuse of optimization knowledge.
  
  We would like to thank cTuning community for feedback, help and support! You are welcome to join this community effort to automate program optimization and compiler/architecture design.

2009.April.27 - We gave a talk at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign about Collective Tuning Initiative and tools and MILEPOST project ("Collective Optimization, run-time adaptation and machine learning"). Presentation is available here. We would like to thank all the UIUC colleagues for a very interesting and useful feedback.

2009.April.21 - Several projects to enable automatic fine-grain program optimization and run-time adaptation in GCC using iterative compilation and machine learning (based on our cTuning/UNIDAPT/ICI/MILEPOST technology) have been accepted by the Google Summer of Code. You are welcome to join cTuning community and follow or participate in the developments using our dedicated mailing lists.

2009.Mar.24 - the new functionality implemented in the master branch on Gitorious was backported to a newly created gcc-4.2.4 branch to support and promote the use of ICI in production environments.

2009.Mar.20 - the master branch of the ICI framework was updated to SVN revision 144783 dated 2009-03-11 16:57:01.

2009.Mar.02 - Google Summer of Code'2009 will be accepting development applications soon - you are welcome to check ICI extension projects and ICI feedback/suggestion pages if you would like to help us to extend our collaborative tools within this program!

2009.Feb.27 - a GCC patch combining ICI-based high-level plugin infrastructure with low-level plugin infrastructure of GCC was submitted to the gcc-patches mailing list.

2009.Feb.13 - the comparison of Mozilla and ICI plugin APIs was uploaded to the GCC Wiki.

2009.Feb.9 - the master branch of the ICI framework was updated to SVN revision 144014 dated 2009-02-08 09:10:15.

2009.Feb.6 - the GCC Steering Committee agreed on the way plugins should be integrated into GCC. A new GCC Wiki page devoted to plugins was opened, and a dedicated "plugins" branch (svn://gcc.gnu.org/svn/gcc/branches/plugins) created in GCC SVN.

2009.Jan.12 - the result of a new SVN sync (SVN rev. 143113 dated 6 January 2009) has been uploaded to Gitorious. It fixes several performance issues which were introduced in GCC 4.3.x.

Old news archive for GCC ICI (2006-2008)
Old news archive for Open64 ICI (2007-2008)
Old news archive for PathScale ICI (2004-2006)

ICI supporters:

You are welcome to register your interest at this page.

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 {{News1|
+*'''2009.September.1''' - The documentation of [http://ctuning.org/milepost-gcc MILEPOST GCC]/[http://ctuning.org/ici GCC ICI] extensions by Yuanjie and Liang during GSOC'09 program is now available: [http://ctuning.org/wiki/index.php/CTools:ICI:Projects:GSOC09:Function_cloning_and_program_instrumentation Function cloning and program instrumentation] and [http://ctuning.org/wiki/index.php/CTools:ICI:Projects:GSOC09:Fine_grain_tuning Fine grain program tuning]. We would like to fully test and sync these developments with mainline GCC within next month or two.
 *'''2009.August.05''' - The colleagues from the [http://unidapt.org UNIDAPT Group] started investigating the use of [http://ctuning.org cTuning]/[http://www.milepost.eu MILEPOST] technology and the [http://ctuning.org/unidapt UNIDAPT framework] to predict good optimization and parallelization schemes for hybrid heterogeneous CPU/GPU-like architectures together with [http://www.caps-entreprise.com CAPS Entreprise] based on run-time adaptation and profiling, empirical iterative compilation, statistical analysis, machine learning, program and dataset features and run-time decision trees ({{Ref|FT2009}}, {{Ref|LCWP2009}}, {{Ref|Fur2009}}, {{Ref|JGVP2009}}, {{Ref1|TWFP2009}}, {{Ref|FMTP2008}}, {{Ref|LFF2007}}, {{Ref|FCOP2005}}). They plan to add new optimization cases to the [http://ctuning.org/cdatabase Collective Optimization Database] in Autumn, 2009.