CISC 873 Course Projects

CISC 873 Compiling for Advanced Architectures
Course Projects

(Fall 2002)

Objectives:

To complement the reading and critique of experimental research papers, the semester research project has the major goal of providing students with the hands-on learning experience of the set of skills needed for conducting experimental research. In particular, students who make a concerted effort on the project should:

Be able to inspect and understand a compiler infrastructure, identify components of the infrastructure of relevance to a particular task to be performed, modify and extend the infrastructure as desired, and experimentally evaluate the effect of the modification.
Be able to design and conduct a small experiment involving the compiler modifications, and present a corresponding succinct presentation of the project.

Overall Project Requirements:

Students will work in groups of 2-3 on a project. The following requirements should be met:

Select an optimization to experimentally investigate.
Read relevant background material from papers/book chapters on the compiler optimization.
Familiarize yourselves with the compiler infrastructure.
Design your implementation plan.
Design your experimental study:
- Metrics
- Benchmarks
- Presentation of results
Discuss your implementation and experimental design with the instructor.
Implement your optimization
Conduct your experiments
Analyze your results
Present a talk on your project and its evaluation

Compiler Infrastructures

You may choose the compiler infrastructure that you use for your project. An infrastructure is usually chosen based on the optimizations already developed in the compiler, the source and target architectures of the compiler, and user friendliness of modifying the infrastructure. The first two infrastructures listed here were developed in an industrial setting, while other compilers freely available for experimentation have primarily been developed in a university setting.

Jikes Research Virtual Machine (already installed locally)
Open64 Compiler (Still being installed locally)
MachSUIF (would need to install locally)
SUIF(would need to install latest version)
Zephyr(would need to install locally)
Other of your choice, with instructor permission.

Deliverables and Due Dates

Due Date	Deliverable	Description
10/1/02	Project Overview	1-page document including: team members, 1-2 paragraphs describing targeted optimization, 2-5 relevant references, and expected results.
10/18/02	Design of Project and Experimental Evaluation	2-4 page document including: description of design of the implementation with pseudocode for the algorithm, where it fits into the infrastructure, and experimental design
11/15/02	Project Review	30 minute demo with instructor, including: 10-20 minutes explaining the code and current state of implementation and 10-25 minutes discussion with instructor on how to proceed for success. Bring list of issues and planned activities for finishing.
12/6/02	Project Implementation Demo	20-30 minute demo of working implementation with instructor, including: 10 minutes explaining implementation, 10 minutes demonstrating 2-3 example codes before/after optimization, and 5 minutes presenting results from experimental study.
12/9-14/02	Project Presentation	25 minute talk presenting your project to the class, including: description of the optimization, example, methodology of implementation, experimental design and results, summary and conclusions, future directions.

Your topic needs to fall within the bounds of the course. Here are some possible areas to investigate, but you are not limited to these areas. If you are unsure, check with the instructor early in the process.

Possible Project Topic Areas