New research paper titled “Exocompilation for productive programming of hardware accelerators,” from researchers at MIT and UC Berkeley.
Per their abstract:
“To better support development of high-performance libraries for specialized hardware, we propose a new programming language, Exo, based on the principle of exocompilation: externalizing target-specific code generation support and optimization policies to user-level code. Exo allows custom hardware instructions, specialized memories, and accelerator configuration state to be defined in user libraries. It builds on the idea of user scheduling to externalize hardware mapping and optimization decisions. Schedules are defined as composable rewrites within the language, and we develop a set of effect analyses which guarantee program equivalence and memory safety through these transformations. We show that Exo enables rapid development of state-of-the-art matrix-matrix multiply and convolutional neural network kernels, for both an embedded neural accelerator and x86 with AVX-512 extensions, in a few dozen lines of code each.”
Find the open access technical paper here. Published June 2022. Find the MIT news article here.
PLDI 2022: Proceedings of the 43rd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and ImplementationJune 2022 Pages 703–718https://doi.org/10.1145/3519939.3523446.E
