Porting GCC to a Clustered VLIW Processor

Porting GCC to a Clustered VLIW Processor

Shankar, A.

Turjan, A. (mentor)
Molnos, A.M. (mentor)

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Electrical Engineering

Computer Engineering

2013-02-26

A clustered architecture is a viable design choice when aiming to increase the performance of a VLIW processor while avoiding the hardware complexity and increased access times associated with a centralized register file. However, this places additional responsibility on the compiler: the production of an efficient cluster assignment. In this thesis, we describe how we ported the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), a popular free compiler, to a clustered version of the Embedded Vector Processor (EVP), a VLIW vector processor being developed at ST-Ericsson. The aim of this thesis project was to produce a prototype GCC back-end for the clustered EVP, and to benchmark it. In this report we describe our implementation in detail, presenting an approach that tackles the problem of clustering, commenting upon existing algorithms, choosing and improving upon one of them while designing a GCC RTL optimization pass for cluster assignment. We visually inspected our prototype for functional correctness, and benchmarked it against the original EVP design and the corresponding production compiler. Our measurements show a 27% speed-up in compute intensive components of the EVP's W-CDMA workload.

GCC
cluster
assignment
VLIW
processor
compiler
optimization

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:49a3bfaa-012f-4e3b-ac34-b8d9a760c4fc

2016-02-01

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2013 Shankar, A.