Compiler development aids coprocessor acceleration

ClearSpeed has developed a powerful, multithreading compiler for the CSX600 architecture, based on the CoSy compiler development system.

ClearSpeed Technology has used the CoSy compiler development system from ACE Associated Compiler Experts in the development of a high-performance parallelising compiler for its accelerator product line that includes the CSX600, a multithreaded array coprocessor.

Bristol-based ClearSpeed Technology is a world leader in acceleration for high performance computing (HPC).

Based around the CSX600, the ClearSpeed Advance accelerator cards (PCI-X and PCIe form factors) provide low-power, high-performance coprocessing capabilities for a wide spectrum of numerically intensive disciplines.

The CSX600 is a massively parallel processor architecture with a SIMD data path with 96 processing elements, each equipped with a dual 64bit FPU, local registers and local memory.

In close co-operation with ACE Associated Compiler Experts, ClearSpeed has developed a powerful, multithreading compiler for the CSX600 architecture, based on the CoSy compiler development system.

In order to support the ClearSpeed Cn programming language, which is a parallel extension to C, ACE has made a number of extensions to the generic, ISO C front-end of the CoSy compiler development system.

The standard CoSy front-end has been enhanced with syntactic support for the Cn language keywords poly and mono, which are used to specify data objects to be processed in parallel by the architecture's 96 processing units.

Similarly, the CoSy internal representation (IR) has been extended with semantic support for poly and mono.

"The Cn language extensions play an important role in obtaining performance for the CSX600 architecture", says Marius Schoorel, Managing Director at ACE.

"ACE carefully integrated the poly/mono extensions into the compiler development framework, making sure that all optimisations in CoSy perform equally well on sequential, as well as parallel code constructs in the multithreading programming model".

Development of the CSX600 compiler has been performed by the ClearSpeed compiler tools team using CoSy from ACE.

Approaching its version 3.0 release, the ClearSpeed software development kit (SDK) supports conditional execution of poly qualified expressions via masked execution on the SIMD datapath.

"CoSy's uniquely open and modular structure has made it possible for us to develop a compiler that effectively exploits the 96-way parallelism available in the CSX600 architecture", says Andrew Wilde, Director of Software at ClearSpeed.

"We are very pleased to have been able to build our high-performance compiler based on the solid foundations of CoSy".

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