Continuing Improvement and Testing of LLVM's PowerPC Backend

PI Name Hal Finkel, LCF
PI Institution Argonne National Laboratory
Collaborating ANL Division Leadership Computing Facility (LCF)
Project Description

LLVM, winner of the 2012 ACM Software System Award, has become an integral part of the software-development ecosystem for optimizing compilers, dynamic-language execution engines, source-code analysis and transformation tools, debuggers and linkers, and a whole host of programming-language and toolchain-related components. Now heavily used in both academia and industry, where it allows for rapid development of production-quality tools, LLVM is increasingly used in work targeted at high-performance computing.

Testbed

JLSE’s POWER hardware is used for the development of new features for, and ongoing testing of, LLVM’s PowerPC backend. This backend allows LLVM to generate highly-optimized code for POWER hardware (including for the A2 cores in IBM’s BG/Q supercomputer). The majority of this development work compliments ALCF’s bgclang compiler project: https://www.alcf.anl.gov/user-guides/bgclang-compiler.