An idiom-finding tool for increasing productivity of accelerators

Abstract

Suppose one is considering purchase of a computer equipped with accelerators. Or suppose one has access to such a computer and is considering porting code to take advantage of the accelerators. Is there a reason to suppose the purchase cost or programmer effort will be worth it? It would be nice to able to estimate the expected improvements in advance of paying money or time. We exhibit an analytical framework and tool-set for providing such estimates: the tools first look for user-defined idioms that are patterns of computation and data access identified in advance as possibly being able to benefit from accelerator hardware. A performance model is then applied to estimate how much faster these idioms would be if they were ported and run on the accelerators, and a recommendation is made as to whether or not each idiom is worth the porting effort to put them on the accelerator and an estimate is provided of what the overall application speedup would be if this were done.