An annotation language for optimizing software libraries

  • Authors:

  • Samuel Z. Guyer;Calvin Lin

  • Affiliations:

  • The University of Texas at Austin;The University of Texas at Austin

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2nd conference on Domain-specific languages
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

This paper introduces an annotation language and a compiler that together can customize a library implementation for specific application needs. Our approach is distinguished by its ability to exploit high level, domain-specific information in the customization process. In particular, the annotations provide semantic information that enables our compiler to analyze and optimize library operations as if they were primitives of a domain-specific language. Thus, our approach yields many of the performance benefits of domain-specific languages, without the effort of developing a new compiler for each domain.This paper presents the annotation language, describes its role in optimization, and illustrates the benefits of the overall approach. Using a partially implemented compiler, we show how our system can significantly improve the performance of two applications written using the PLAPACK parallel linear algebra library.