Mission Statement
Parallel computing systems have become omnipresent in recent years through the penetration of multi-core processors in all IT markets, ranging from small scale embedded systems to large scale supercomputers. These systems have a profound effect on software development in science as most applications are not designed to exploit multiple cores. The complexity in developing and optimizing parallel programs will rise sharply in the future, as many-core computing systems become highly heterogeneous in nature, integrating general purpose cores with accelerator cores. Modern and in particular future parallel computing systems will be so complex that it appears to be impossible for any human programmer to effectively parallelize and optimize programs across architectures.
The main goal of the Insieme project of the University of Innsbruck is to research ways of automatically optimizing parallel programs for homogeneous and heterogeneous multi-core architectures and to provide a source-to-source compiler that offers such capabilities to the user.
To that end, Insieme features the following:
- Support for multiple programming languages and paradigms such as C, Cilk, OpenMP and OpenCL (C++ and MPI support is under development)
- Multi-objective optimization techniques supporting objectives such as execution time, energy consumption, resource usage efficiency and computing costs
- The Insieme Runtime System which provides an abstract interface to the hardware infrastructure, offering online code tuning and steering, dynamic reconfiguration of hardware resources and monitoring of the application's performance
- An input code independent Intermediate Representation (INSPIRE) for developing new compiler techniques to optimize parallel programs
- A rich analysis and transformation toolbox which operates on INSPIRE and aims to maximize developer productivity when researching new optimizations
- Deep integration between the compiler and its associated runtime system, allowing the convenient exchange of arbitrary meta-information for novel combined optimization strategies
We choose to build Insieme this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, and one we are unwilling to postpone.
- the Insieme motto, with apologies to John F. Kennedy