SSA-based MATLAB-to-C compilation and optimization

• Type: Article in International Conference Proceedings Book
• Date: 2016

Authors

Reis, L (Author) Other; João Bispo (Author) FEUP; João M. P. Cardoso (Author) FEUP

Conference proceedings International

Title: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Libraries, Languages, and Compilers for Array Programming, ARRAY@PLDI 2016, Santa Barbara, CA, USA, June 14, 2016

Pages: 55-62

3rd ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Libraries, Languages, and Compilers for Array Programming, ARRAY 2016

14 June 2016

Indexing

Scopus - 5 Citations

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-00K-MQD

DOI: 10.1145/2935323.2935330

Abstract (EN): Many fields of engineering, science and finance use models that are developed and validated in high-level languages such as MATLAB. However, when moving to environments with resource constraints or portability challenges, these models often have to be rewritten in lower-level languages such as C. Doing so manually is costly and error-prone, but automated approaches tend to generate code that can be substantially less efficient than the handwritten equivalents. Additionally, it is usually difficult to read and improve code generated by these tools. In this paper, we describe how we improved our MATLAB-to-C compiler, based on the MATISSE framework, to be able to compete with handwritten C code. We describe our new IR and the most important optimizations that we use in order to obtain acceptable performance. We also analyze multiple C code versions to identify where the generated code is slower than the handwritten code and identify a few key improvements to generate code capable of outperforming handwritten C. We evaluate the new version of our compiler using a set of benchmarks, including the Disparity benchmark, from the San Diego Vision Benchmark Suite, on a desktop computer and on an embedded device. The achieved results clearly show the efficiency of the current version of the compiler. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific