Proceedings of the First Workshop on Program Transformation for Programmability in Heterogeneous Architectures

TL;DR

This paper discusses the challenges and developments in automating program transformations to enhance programmability and performance in heterogeneous computing architectures, emphasizing the need for advanced reasoning tools.

Contribution

It introduces the first workshop dedicated to program transformation techniques for heterogeneous architectures, highlighting new approaches and tools for automating complex code modifications.

Findings

Identification of key challenges in automating code transformations.

Discussion of tools requiring semantic understanding of code.

Emphasis on strategies for optimal transformation sequences.

Abstract

This volume contains the proceedings of PROHA 2016, the first workshop on Program Transformation for Programmability in Heterogeneous Architectures, held on March 12, 2016 in Barcelona, Spain, as an affiliated workshop of CGO 2016, the 14th International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization. Developing and maintaining high-performance applications and libraries for heterogeneous architectures while preserving its semantics and with a reasonable efficiency is a time-consuming task which is often only possible for experts. It often requires manually adapting sequential, platform-agnostic code to different infrastructures, and keeping the changes in all of these infrastructures in sync. These program modification tasks are costly and error-prone. Tools to assist in and, if possible, automate such transformations are of course of great interest. However, such tools may need significant reasoning and knowledge processing capabilities, including, for example, being able to process machine-understandable descriptions of the semantics of a piece of code is expected to do; to perform program transformations inside a context in which they are applicable; to use strategies to identify the sequence of transformations leading to the best resulting code; and others.