Dynamic Compilation for Transprecision Applications on Heterogeneous Platform

Abstract

This article describes a software environment called HybroGen, which helps to experiment binary code generation at run time. As computing architectures are getting more complex, the application performance is becoming data-dependent. The proposed experimental platform is helpful in programming applications that can be reconfigured at run time in order to be adapted for a new data environment. The HybroGen platform is adapted to heterogeneous architectures and can generate instructions for different targets. This platform allows to go farther than classical JIT compilation in many directions: the code generator is smaller by three orders of magnitude and faster by three orders of magnitude, compared to JIT (Just-In-Time) platforms, and allows making code transformation that is impossible in traditional compilation schemes, such as code generation for non von Neumann accelerators or dynamic code transformations for transprecision. The latter is illustrated in a code example: the square root with Newton’s algorithm. We also illustrate the proposed HybroGen platform with two other examples: a multiplication with a specialization on a value determined at run time, and a conversion of degrees Celsius to degrees Fahrenheit. This article presents a proof of concept of the proposed HybroGen platform in terms of its functionalities, and demonstrates the working status.