[llvm-dev] Modern Vector Instructions: Compilation & Code Generation & Hardware Design @ LLVM Compiler Social Zurich - Thursday Jan 10

[Tobias Grosser via llvm-dev]

Dear all,

Thursday 10th Dec, 19:00, we discuss modern vectorization from compiler representation, instruction set design, down to to hardware implementation. With Simon Moll, Robin Kruppe, and Matheus Cavalcante we host experts from Saarbruecken, Darmstadt and Zurich.

Talk 1: EVL -- Bringing LLVM's IR up to speed with vectorization.

There has been a recent surge in vector ISAs, let it be the RISC-V V extension, ARM SVE or NEC SX-Aurora, all of which pose new demands to LLVM IR. Among their novel features are an active vector length, full predication on all vector instructions and a register length that is unknown at compile time. In this talk, we present the Explicit Vector Length extension (EVL) for LLVM IR. EVL provides primitives that are practical for both, backends and IR-level automatic vectorizers. At the same time, EVL is compatible with LLVM-SVE and even existing short SIMD ISAs stand to benefit from its consistent handling of predication.

Simon Moll is a fourth-year PhD student at Saarland University. He is best known for his work on the Region Vectorizer (RV), which brings Outer-Loop and Whole-Function Vectorization to LLVM IR with ISPC-like control-flow handling.

Talk 2: RISC-V Vectors in LLVM

The vector extension, called 'V' for short, adds standardized vector processing capabilities to RISC-V. Similar to other modern vector architectures such as Arm's Scalable Vector Extension (SVE), it supports a wide range of processor designs by allowing the maximum size of a vector to be determined at run time rather than being fixed at design time. These variable vector lengths, and other features driven by the need to support many different applications and microarchitectures, pose new challenges for compilers. This talk discusses some of these challenges as well as the work happening in LLVM to address them, both to support variable-length vectors in general as well as the particulars of RISC-V vectors.

Robin Kruppe is an M.Sc. student at TU Darmstadt in the Embedded Systems and Applications group. He is a member of the working group defining the RISC-V vector extension and active in the LLVM community, leading the development of LLVM support for that extension.

Talk 3: ARA: 64-bit RISC-V Vector Implementation in 22nm FDSOI

In this talk, we detail our experience in the design and implementation of the RISC-V Vector Extensions (v0.4 draft) in an advanced silicon process. ARA is a high-performance vector co-processor soft core that attaches to and cooperates with an existing open-source RISC-V core Ariane, implementing RV64GC.

Matheus Cavalcante is a PhD Student at the Integrated Systems Laboratory of ETH Zurich, under the supervision of Professor Luca Benini, working on HPC devices, specifically vector processors.

# Registration

https://www.meetup.com/llvm-compiler-and-code-generation-socials-zurich/events/vxmqlqyzcbnb/

# What

A social meetup to discuss compilation and code generation questions with a focus on LLVM, clang, Polly and related projects.

Our primary focus is to provide a venue (and drinks & snacks) that enables free discussions between interested people without imposing an agenda/program. This is a great opportunity to informally discuss your own projects, get project ideas or just learn about what people at  ETH and around Zurich are doing with LLVM.

Related technical presentations held by participants are welcome (please 
contact us).

# Who:  - Anybody interested -

  - ETH students and staff
  - LLVM developers and enthusiasts external to ETH

# When:  10.01.2018, 19:00

# Where: CAB E 72, ETH Zurich

# Earlier Socials

We have videos of earlier socials available at: http://pollylabs.org/llvm-social-zurich.html

Best,
Tobias