[Colloquium] Talk by Mark Stephenson on Monday, April 24, 2006

[Margery Ishmael]

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE - TALK

Date: Monday, April 24, 2006
Time: 2:30 p.m.
Place: Ryerson 251

-------------------------------------------

Speaker:  MARK STEPHENSON

From:  CSAIL at MIT

Url:  http://www.cag.lcs.mit.edu/~mstephen/

Title:  Automating the Construction of Compiler Heuristics using  
Machine Learning

Abstract:

Designing optimizing compilers is a black art. Compiler writers are  
expected to create effective and inexpensive solutions to NP-hard  
problems such as instruction scheduling and register allocation. To  
make matters worse, separate optimization phases have strong  
interactions and competing resource constraints. Compiler writers  
deal with system complexity by dividing the problem into multiple  
phases and devising approximate heuristics for each phase. However,  
to achieve satisfactory performance, developers are forced to  
manually tweak their heuristics with trial-and-error experimentation.

In this talk I will discuss how to construct effective compiler  
heuristics with machine learning.  In particular I will show how to  
automatically learn powerful heuristics for several important  
compiler problems: region formation, register allocation, loop  
unrolling, and adaptive recompilation.  In most cases, the machine- 
learned heuristics perform much better than their state-of-the-art  
hand-crafted counterparts. By automatically collecting data and  
systematically analyzing them, my techniques discover non-obvious and  
non-trivial interactions that even experienced engineers would likely  
overlook. In addition to improving performance, my techniques have a  
significant impact on design complexity.  Machine learning algorithms  
can design significant portions of a compiler heuristic, thereby  
freeing the human designer to focus on compiler correctness.

This work serves as a foundation for a general framework to custom  
tailor compilation technology to increasingly large applications and  
complex architectures. As industry shifts toward ever more complex  
systems, automated design techniques will be necessary to efficiently  
construct effective compilers.

***The talk will be followed by refreshments in Ryerson 255***

-------------------------------------------------------

Host:  Anne Rogers.

People in need of assistance should call 773-834-8977 in advance.

For information on future CS talks: http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/events


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.cs.uchicago.edu/pipermail/colloquium/attachments/20060413/77be3515/attachment.htm