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Nikolaos Kyrtatas (Master thesis, Computer Science, ETH Zurich, Switzerland, 2014)
A Basic Linear Algebra Compiler for Embedded Processors
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Bibtex
In many fields, such as signal processing, control, and graphics, there is a significant demand for efficient Dense Linear Algebra (DLA) code for embedded devices. At the same time, code generators have proved to be useful for generating fast DLA code for general-purpose computers. An example is LGen, a research compiler designed after Spiral for basic linear algebra computations of fixed size. In this thesis, we extend LGen towards four processors that are widely used in the embedded ecosystem: Intel Atom, ARM Cortex-A8, ARM Cortex-A9, and ARM1176. For this purpose, we introduce into the LGen methodology a set of optimizations that take into account the specific limitations and capabilities of these processors, aiming at generating highly optimized code for them. An extensive set of experiments run on our target platforms shows that the new version of LGen produces code that performs better than well-established, commercial and non-commercial libraries (Intel MKL and Intel IPP), software generators (Eigen and ATLAS), and compilers (icc, gcc, and clang). The large number of experiments that we conducted on the four investigated processors were executed using Mediator, a web-based middleware that was developed as part of this thesis. Mediator offers a RESTful interface that makes possible the simultaneous execution of experiments on multiple SSH-accessible devices by multiple users. More specifically, it guarantees mutual exclusion of the experiments running on a specific core, while at the same time applies load balancing over the cores of a device. On top of that, it also provides an easy-to-use mechanism for retrieving performance metrics on a variety of architectures with minimal user involvement.
Keywords: SIMD vectorization, Linear algebra, Embedded ProcessorsMore information: