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Boffins look for super compiler |
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Written by Nick Farrell
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Wednesday, 08 April 2009 10:37 |
Able to leap tall abstractions in a
single bound
Boffins at Rice University have been given shedloads of cash
to come up with a super compiler which can speed up computers and reduce the
power they need.
Code compilers, which translate languages into machine code,
are a bottle neck to computer speed. They also take a long time to build and,
by the time they are out, are hopelessly out of date. The Rice University
boffins believe they can solve this issue by developing a single new
super-compiler that could improve the performance of nearly every application
running on a computer chip.
The US Department of Defence likes the plan so
much that its Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency has agreed to spend $16
million over the next 54 months to allow Rice and its partners, including Texas
Instruments, to develop a set of tools to significantly improve
compilers.
The boffin's plan of attack is to strike on two fronts. First,
they aim to develop computational tools that automatically analyze a processor,
such as how many operations it can perform at once.
The next stage is to
build an open-source compiler that, based upon the analysis of a processor's
capabilities, can automatically tailor itself to help programmers easily develop
a reasonably good compiler.
If they can get it going then small processors,
such as those in mobile phones, the main benefit probably will be a decrease in
power usage. The bigger processors should get increased processing power.
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