Interactive Compilation Interface

The Interactive Compilation Interface (or 'ICI' for short) is a plugin system with a high-level compiler-independent and low-level compiler-dependent API to transform current black-box compilers into collaborative modular interactive toolsets. The ICI framework acts as a "middleware" interface between the compiler and the user-definable plugins. It opens up and reuses the production-quality compiler infrastructure to enable program analysis and instrumentation, fine-grain program optimizations, simple prototyping of new development and research ideas while avoiding building new compilation tools from scratch. For example, it is used in MILEPOST GCC to automate compiler and architecture design and program optimizations based on statistical analysis and machine learning, and predict profitable optimization to improve program execution time, code size and compilation time.

Downloads

• ICI 2.0 - released for GCC in May, 2009.
• ICI 1.0 - released for GCC in 2008.
• ICI beta - developed for GCC in 2006-2008.
• ICI beta - developed for Open64/PathScale compilers in 2004-2006.

Current developments

• Collaborative development website
• Google Summer of Code'2009 extensions: enabling fine-grain program optimizations including polyhedral transformations, function level run-time adaptation and collective optimization]
• Development mailing list

References

• Grigori Fursin. Collective Tuning Initiative: automating and accelerating development and optimization of computing systems. Proceedings of the GCC Summit'09, Montreal, Canada, June 2009 (link)

• Grigori Fursin, Cupertino Miranda, Olivier Temam, Mircea Namolaru, Elad Yom-Tov, Ayal Zaks, Bilha Mendelson, Phil Barnard, Elton Ashton, Eric Courtois, Francois Bodin, Edwin Bonilla, John Thomson, Hugh Leather, Chris Williams, Michael O'Boyle. MILEPOST GCC: machine learning based research compiler. Proceedings of the GCC Developers' Summit, Ottawa, Canada, June 2008 (link)

• MILEPOST GCC: machine learning enabled interactive research compiler based on ICI