LLVM in HPC: Uses and Desires
Authors: Mr. Jim Cownie (Intel Corporation)
BP
Abstract: LLVM is the prime environment for developing new compilers and language-processing tools. In this BoF a group of LLVM experts who are driving the use of LLVM in HPC-relevant projects will give short presentations of their work, answer your questions, and discuss the future of LLVM in HPC.
As well as Hal Finkel, our experts include Doug Miles (Fortran), Tobias Grosser (Polly), Keno Fischer (Julia), and Carlo Bertolli (OpenMP).
Our goal is to connect you with LLVM experts so that you understand some of the uses of LLVM, and they understand what tools and LLVM enhancements you want.
Long Description: HPC programmers rely on compilers and analysis tools. LLVM is the environment of choice for the development of such tools, and thus should be of interest to many HPC programmers.
The goals of the BoF are: to educate people who are interested in LLVM, but not actively involved in the development about its current state, and about the compilers/tools which are built on top of it; to allow people who are interested in using LLVM in their projects to question LLVM experts and to understand why LLVM should matter to them; to give feedback to the experts about where our audience wants LLVM to be developing.
The tangible result of the BoF will be a report summarizing the discussions which take place which can be published as a blog on the LLVM web site so that people who cannot attend SC can read it,. It will also be presented to the LLVM foundation board of directors.
The expected audience is both people who are developing programming tools which use, or may use, LLVM, such as compilers, performance analysis tools, code re-writing tools, runtime libraries, new languages, ... and also the users of such systems. Users should be interested in the state of the LLVM environment since it can allow them to use LLVM based compilers on multiple platforms, including support for the latest OpenMP standards, reducing the effort needed to port codes by providing the same language dialects on all supported platforms.
A similar BOF was held at SC14 and was well attended (at least 75 people attended). Given that product compilers from IBM, NVIDIA, and other vendors producing state-of-the-art supercomputing platforms are now incorporating significant LLVM components, and the availability of PGI's flang (Fortran LLVM compiler), we expect significant interest among SC attendees in discussing these developments.
Conference Presentation: pdf
Birds of a Feather Index