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“Research Challenges in Computing” Seminar Series
September 1, 2023 @ 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Friday, September 1st
11am-12pm
MEB 3147 (LCR)
MEB 3147 (LCR)
John Regehr
Professor
Translation Validation for a Compiler Backend
Abstract: Compilers are supposed to be correct, but they aren’t. Translation validation — proving that a particular invocation of a compiler did the right thing — is a promising way forward. I will talk about taking Alive2, a widely-used translation validation tool for LLVM’s “middle end” optimizations that we created, and extending it to apply to LLVM’s back end that emits ARM64 code. Combined with a simple fuzzer, this tool has detected more than 20 silent miscompilation bugs in this backend, so far.
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Saday Sadayappan
Professor
Data Movement Challenges in Compiler Optimization
Abstract: A fundamental bottleneck in achieving a high fraction of peak performance in computers is data movement – both between processors and through memory hierarchies. While compilers like Clang/LLVM are very advanced in minimizing the number of executed instructions in machine code compiled from high-level programs in languages like C++, they are much less effective in automatically minimizing the amount of data movement required. In this short talk, I will describe some fundamental challenges for compilers in this regard.