The IBM Systems Journal (Volume 45, NUmber 1, 2006), although aimed at aspects of online game technology, nevertheless contains an interesting hint at the possible future direction of compiler technology which is being designed take advantage of the growth in processor complexity.
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj45-1.html
Using advanced compiler technology to exploit the performance of the Cell Broadband Engine architecture, describes the research that is progressing to optimise (compile) code written in a high-level language to fit a multi-processor (cell) architecture.
The prototype compiler innovatively takes advantage of and extends existing parallelization technology to enable partitioning and parallelization across multiple heterogeneous processing elements from within a single compilation process.
The implication is that the programmer will not have to worry too much about the machine architecture the application is aimed at relying instead on the compiler to produce code that is optimised for the hardware it will execute on (although the capability will still exist for lower-level dabbling if necessary).
Although at an early stage, it won’t be long before this approach is likely to be adapted to the mass market of application writers for the multi-core architectures from Intel and AMD.
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/451/eichenberger.html
(For those diehards there’s lots of detail about IBMs compiler research at Compiler Technology for Scalable Architectures
Recent Comments