[LLVMdev] GSOC - HLVM Work

[Torvald Riegel]

On Thursday 22 March 2007 06:25, Christopher Lamb wrote:
> I'm quite new to hacking on LLVM, but I'll give you an idea I had
> reading some of the recent dev list posts. I think investigating
> concurrency with regards to LLVM would be very useful (what with
> multi-cores and all). This could be concurrency in regards to GC, or
> it could be simply looking at how LLVM can best interface with
> standard concurrency paradigms (OpenMP, MPI) for the languages it
> supports. With a GCC 4.2 front-end port of the front-end available
> what is necessary to enable OpenMP support? Given a FORTRAN front-end
> based on GCC is being considered how could high performance numeric
> codes benefit from some aspect of LLVM?

Really tackling concurrency issues is probably too much work for a summer 
unless you are already familiar with concurrent programming. You could try to 
produce good code for an existing runtime system, though. With Software 
Transactional Memory, for example, you can get large speedups by just 
avoiding loads/stores from/to main memory, replacing upgrades from read 
access to write access with a single write access, etc. Most of that requires 
reasoning only in the sequential domain.


Torvald