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Handling Irregular ILP Within Conventional VLIW Schedulers Using Artificial Resource Constraints [abstract] (ACM DL)
Subramanian Rajagopalan, Manish Vachharajani, and Sharad Malik
Proceedings of the International Conference on Compilers and Synthesis for Embedded Systems, November 2000.

Instruction set architects and compiler writers often have conflicting requirements on the design of the instruction set. The architects are driven by potential micro-architecture complexity and possibly by code size considerations; while the compiler writers prefer clean orthogonal instruction sets amenable to regular compiler algorithms. This struggle has stabilized with a resulting uneasy boundary between the RISC and CISC architectural styles in general purpose computing. However, in the embedded computing world, with domain specific processors (e.g. Digital Signal Processors (DSPs)), this struggle continues. It has resulted in very irregular architectures that are very hard to compile for and that need specialized optimization techniques.

An increasing trend in embedded processing is to use VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) processors, which need to be supported by efficient compilers that can extract the instruction level parallelism (ILP) at compile time. However, the ISAs (Instruction Set Architectures) for these machines are still driven by embedded processing constraints (small code size, simpler hardware), and consequently all available ILP may not always be cleanly reflected in the ISA. This presents a significant problem for the compiler, since tradition VLIW compilers work directly with physical resources to determine what can and cannot be scheduled in parallel. It is obviously desirable to leverage the large body of work done in VLIW compilation - however, many embedded ISAs make this impossible. This forces the development of specialized optimization techniques for these processors - an undesirable allocation of research effort; or even worse, coding in assembly language - an undesirable allocation of engineering effort.

In this paper we show how the irregularities in the ISA can actually be matched with the regular resource based requirements of classic VLIW compilers by generating a set of artificial resources based on the ISA specification. These resources may not correspond to any real physical resources, but are created to provide a uniform specification to the VLIW compiler (actually the scheduler) as to what can and cannot be done in parallel. This enables the use of the large body of work (and software) in VLIW compilation to be directly used for these irregular processors.

The artificial resources are generated by solving a combinatorial graph labeling problem which is generated from the ISA specification. We show that this problem is equivalent to the problem of covering all the edges in a given graph using the minimum number of cliques (complete subgraphs). This is a known NP-complete problem - thus, we can leverage the heuristics already developed for this. In addition, there is a direct transformation between this problem and the well studied graph coloring problem. This transformation enables us to use the large body of work (and software!) in the graph coloring problem domain.

Finally, we demonstrate the application of these ideas in the development of compilers for two proprietary DSPs - the Elixir and the Hiperion DSPs from Fujitsu. In the past, compilers were developed for these processors using highly specialized optimization algorithms. This is now being replaced by using the proposed technique of generating artificial resources with an existing VLIW compiler (the IMPACT compiler).

We believe that the development of these ideas opens the door for using classic VLIW compilation methods for irregular embedded VLIW DSPs and is a significant step forward in the development of software tools for embedded processing.