Sparse tensors arise in problems in science, engineering, machine learning, and data analytics. Programs that operate on such tensors can exploit sparsity to reduce storage requirements and computational time. Developing and maintaining sparse software by hand, however, is a complex and error-prone task. Therefore, we propose treating sparsity as a property of tensors, not a tedious implementation task, and letting a sparse compiler generate sparse code automatically from a sparsity-agnostic definition of the computation. This article discusses integrating this idea into MLIR.

Modern processors are evolving into hybrid, heterogeneous processors with both CPU and GPU cores used for general purpose computation. Several languages such as Brook, CUDA, and more recently OpenCL are being developed to fully harness the potential of these processors. These languages typically involve the control code running on the CPU and the performance-critical, data-parallel kernel code running on the GPUs.

We propose a new universal High-Level Information (HLI) format to effectively integrate front-end and back-end compilers by passing front-end information to the back-end compiler. Importing this information into an existing back-end leverages the state-of-the-art analysis and transformation capabilities of existing front-end compilers to allow the back-end greater optimization potential than it has when relying on only locally-extracted information. A version of the HLI has been implemented in the SUIF parallelizing compiler and the GCC back-end compiler. Experimental results with the SPEC benchmarks show that HLI can provide GCC with substantially more accurate data dependence information than it can obtain on its own. Our results show that the number of dependence edges in GCC can be reduced by an average of 48% for the integer benchmark programs and an average of 54% for the floating-point benchmark programs studied, which provides greater flexibility to GCC's code scheduling pass. Even with the scheduling optimization limited to basic blocks, the use of HLI produces moderate speedups compared to using only GCC's dependence tests when the optimized programs are executed on MIPS R4600 and R10000 processors.