Saturday, March 24, 2007

Sieves - CodePlay MultiCore Compiler

Codeplay has developed a parallelizing compiler for multicore architectures based on sieves concept. A sieve is a block of code that can be "safely" parallelized by the compiler. In a sieve any side-effects inside the block are delayed until the end of the sieve block itself. Delaying side-effects allows the compiler to use a straightforward dependency analysis to automatically partition sieve blocks into fragments that can be safely executed in parallel.

Two interesting paper to understand how CodePlay compiler works are:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/%7Edamp/finalPapers/lindley.pdf

http://www.codeplay.com/downloads_public/sievepaper-2columns-normal.pdf

Note that Codeplay compiler should be able to generate code optimized also for multicore architectures with local memories (like IBM CELL) and for GPGPU computing.

Sunday, March 11, 2007

First post

Hi all! "Brain on Silicon" wanna be a community about Computer Architecture for PhD students and researcher primarily coming from the Politecnico di Milano. The origin of the blog are in the old website of the so called "PoliMi Computer Architecture Group" which was forced to move to http://sagroup.elet.polimi.it and included into the Departement's website.

The main idea of this blog is to provide an "international" forum where posting comments and ideas about computers and processors (?compilers?), regardless affiliation of the authors. So feel free to post;) Maybe authors' publications and projects too...