[LLVMdev] 9 Ideas To Better Support Source Language Developers

[Chris Lattner]

On Wed, 7 Jan 2004, Valery A.Khamenya wrote:
> just imagine, that we have Linux cluster, and we have two functions in
> one module (`f' and `g'). If they are about to be executed at one host,
> then one is allowed to do very aggressive interprocedural
> optimizations between these `f' and `g'. However if `g' should be
> "outsourced to" (i.e. "executed at") other host then `f', then one is
> prohibited to do almost any optimizations between `f' and `g'.

Typically distributed computing like this is performed at a much higher
level than things like LLVM.  Mechanisms like RPC (remote procedure calls)
are used to do things like this, which makes the low-level code look a lot
different than a standard call.

> Am I right up to here? if `yes' then:
> One is hardly able to make support for distributed calculations on top
> of LLVM. Because, in order to make legal optimizations LLVM should
> _know_ where the code is really executed.

The RPC calls would automatically make the LLVM transformations safe: even
the interprocedural optimizations are conservatively correct in the face
of partial and incomplete programs (if they can't figure out what a piece
of code is doing, they won't break it).

LLVM should support distributed computing as well as, say, C does... not
that C supports is particularly well... :)

-Chris

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