llvm dev - Nov 2016 - Parallel IR [PIR] --- Discussion sheet

Hi Johannes,

Our research group is very interested in extending the LLVM IR to support
parallelism, and we are doing research in this topic. In our group, in order to
target parallel hardware we designed a parallelism abstraction which we call
Heterogeneous Parallel Virtual Machine (HPVM) consisting of a hierarchical
dataflow graph with shared memory and vector instructions. Based on the HPVM
abstaction, we developed a virtual istruction set that aims to achieve
functional and perfomance portability, that is also used as a compiler IR for
optimizations. HPVM is build on top of LLVM IR using LLVM intrinsics. We have
implemented prototype backends that translate the HPVM abstractions to nVidia
GPUs, Intel's AVX vector units, and to multicore X86 processors. We have
seen that HPVM can effectively express many forms of parallelism, including task
parallelism, coarse-grain data parallelism, fine-grain data parallelism, and
pipelined parallelism. Also, that it provides flexibility in mapping different
parts of an application down to heterogeneous hardware, and is expressive enough
to express memory tiling, essential for achieving high performance on GPU and
CPU targets. (For more details about this, I can provide a link to our technical
report.)

I am looking forward to discussing this further, as well as other aspects of
this topic, during the LLVM Developers Meeting.

Best regards,
Maria Kotsifakou
PhD candidate, UIUC
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