NOELLE Offers Empowering LLVM Extensions

TL;DR

NOELLE is an extensible LLVM-based compilation layer that enables custom high-level analysis tools, significantly reducing code size and supporting complex architectures.

Contribution

It introduces NOELLE, a modular, demand-driven compilation layer for LLVM that simplifies building custom analysis tools for modern architectures.

Findings

Achieved 33.2% to 99.2% reduction in code size with NOELLE-based tools.

Demonstrated versatility with ten diverse custom tools.

Showcased NOELLE's adaptability and efficiency.

Abstract

Modern and emerging architectures demand increasingly complex compiler analyses and transformations. As the emphasis on compiler infrastructure moves beyond support for peephole optimizations and the extraction of instruction-level parallelism, they should support custom tools designed to meet these demands with higher-level analysis-powered abstractions of wider program scope. This paper introduces NOELLE, a robust open-source domain-independent compilation layer built upon LLVM providing this support. NOELLE is modular and demand-driven, making it easy-to-extend and adaptable to custom-tool-specific needs without unduly wasting compile time and memory. This paper shows the power of NOELLE by presenting a diverse set of ten custom tools built upon it, with a 33.2% to 99.2% reduction in code size (LoC) compared to their counterparts without NOELLE.