An addition for the publications page on llvm.org (and of potential interest to
other people using LLVM for high-performance SIMD computation.) The ispc
project would never have been possible without LLVM; many thanks to all involved
in the LLVM project for building such a great system.
Thanks,
-matt
ispc: A SPMD Compiler for High-Performance CPU Programming
Matt Pharr and William R. Mark
Innovative Parallel Computing (InPar) 2012
http://cloud.github.com/downloads/ispc/ispc/ispc_inpar_2012.pdf
Abstract:
SIMD parallelism has become an increasingly important mechanism for delivering
performance in modern CPUs, due its power efficiency and relatively low cost in
die area compared to other forms of parallelism. Unfortunately, languages and
compilers for CPUs have not kept up with the hardware's capabilities.
Existing CPU parallel programming models focus primarily on multi-core
parallelism, neglecting the substantial computational capabilities that are
available in CPU SIMD vector units. GPU-oriented languages like OpenCL support
SIMD but lack capabilities needed to achieve maximum efficiency on CPUs and
suffer from GPU-driven constraints that impair ease of use on CPUs.
We have developed a compiler, the Intel SPMD Program Compiler (ispc), that
delivers very high performance on CPUs thanks to effective use of both multiple
processor cores and SIMD vector units. ispc draws from GPU programming
languages, which have
shown that for many applications the easiest way to program SIMD units is to use
a single-program, multiple-data (SPMD) model, with each instance of the program
mapped to one SIMD lane. We discuss language features that make ispc easy to
adopt and use productively with existing software systems and show that ispc
delivers up to 35x speedups on a 4-core system and up to 240x speedups on a
40-core system for complex workloads (compared to serial C++ code).
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