ProtoX: A First Look

TL;DR

ProtoX introduces a novel code generation framework that combines Proto and SPIRAL to optimize stencil and pointwise operations in PDE solutions, enabling abstraction fusion and improved performance across CPU, multi-core CPU, and GPU.

Contribution

This paper presents ProtoX, integrating SPIRAL as a backend to Proto, allowing for advanced abstraction fusion and optimized code generation for PDE-related computations.

Findings

Generated code for CPU, multi-core CPU, and GPU.

Performance improvements demonstrated on CPU.

Enables abstraction fusion difficult for traditional compilers.

Abstract

We present a first look at ProtoX, a code generation framework for stencil and pointwise operations that occur frequently in the numerical solution of partial differential equations. ProtoX has Proto as its library frontend and SPIRAL as the backend. Proto is a C++ based domain specific library which optimizes the algorithms used to compute the numerical solution of partial differential equations. Meanwhile, SPIRAL is a code generation system that focuses on generating highly optimized target code. Although the current design layout of Proto and its high level of abstractions provide a user friendly set up, there is still a room for improving it's performance by applying various techniques either at a compiler level or at an algorithmic level. Hence, in this paper we propose adding SPIRAL as the library backend for Proto enabling abstraction fusion, which is usually difficult to perform by any compiler. We demonstrate the construction of ProtoX by considering the 2D Poisson equation as a model problem from Proto. We provide the final generated code for CPU, Multi-core CPU, and GPU as well as some performance numbers for CPU.