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Using AI With GCC to Speed Up Mobile Design
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Jul 02, 2008 12:46 PM
from the leave-it-to-the-machines dept.
from the leave-it-to-the-machines dept.
Atlasite writes "The WSJ is reporting on a EU project called Milepost aimed at integrating AI inside GCC. The team partners, which include include IBM, the University of Edinburgh and the French research institute, INRIA, announced their preliminary results at the recent GCC Summit, being able to increase the performance of GCC by 10% in just one month's work. GCC Summit paper is provided [PDF]."
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MachIne Learning for Embedded PrOgramS opTimizatio (Score:4, Insightful)
Can we please stop using pointless backronyms? What purpose do they serve?
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Sure, I understand the use of acronyms (I was in the military for over 10 years), but in this case, I don't see either form making the other easier to recall.
Re:MachIne Learning for Embedded PrOgramS opTimiza (Score:4, Insightful)
GCC is easier to remember? Ok, that really isn't an acronym (or bacronym I guess... is it?)
Actually, either acronyms and bacronyms [wikipedia.org] (a word I had to look up, having never seen it before, but damn I was 30 when the word was coined and forty before it was ever documented) are ok by me.
What's not ok is the devolution of literacy. "Back in the day" the rule was, and still should be, that the first time any acronym (and now bacronym) is used in any document, it should be spelled out:
"Wall Street Journal" should be spelled out because dammit, Jim, I'm a nerd, not a greedhead. EU should need no more explanation than US. AI shouldn't need explanation; this is, after all, a nerd site and the term has been around almost as long as I have. IBM has been around a lot longer and is usually how the company is referred to; that's its name. Its commercials and ads don't even say "International Business Machines".
CGG would be unknown to non-Linux users and non-programmers, so it should have been spelled out as well. PDF doesn't need to be expanded because gees, everybody knows what a PDF is but who knows what a portable document format is?
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Re:MachIne Learning for Embedded PrOgramS opTimiza (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you mean:
Yeah, not always a good idea.
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Re:MachIne Learning for Embedded PrOgramS opTimiza (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, I think MachIne Learning for Quick Target Optimization And Speed Technology would have been a much better forward acronym.
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Shouldn't that be
MachIne Learning for Fast ON Target Optimization And Speed Technology
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Yes! Just be honest: "We called it that because we liked the word."
We should have recruted Al earlier. (Score:5, Funny)
This Al guy seem to be a really good developer. We should have noticed his skilled and got him into optimizing GCC a long time ago. ... I like arial font.
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Your post is also confusing. Why abbreviate? Why not say "This A or guy seem"? Or were you just trying to pipe two sentence fragments?
Re:We should have recruted Al earlier. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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The latter.
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Yes.
np: The Orb - Plateau (Orbus Terrarum Remastered)
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I looked at the PDF. Significant parts of it were unreadable on Foxit Reader! Are any other .pdf readers having trouble?
Perhaps the way to other things besides compilers? (Score:3, Interesting)
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This particular part made me think of a day when every program comes with a redesign.exe. Simply click the button, and it scans every piece of hardware on your computer, and then rewrites every optimization in it to perfectly fit your computer. Programs that streamline to your hardware, maybe even change the OS's they work under. It's written for Windows, you're running OSX? No problem, it'll rewrite itself as an OSX program. Though, that's probably still decades off. But AI seems to me to be the way to ultimate compatibility.
This exists today without ai. See java with JIT or even AOT (ahead of time). There are of course some issues with it but the technology is there.
Re:Perhaps the way to other things besides compile (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't this Gentoo as well?
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Re:Perhaps the way to other things besides compile (Score:2, Funny)
Sounds like a Gentoo user's wet dream.
Re:Perhaps the way to other things besides compile (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually IBM did this a few decades ago.
The Model38/AS400/iSeries are all compatible but very different machines internally.
IBM came up with an "idea" instruction set that no CPU used. When you do the initial program load "install" on one of those machines it compiles the ideal instruction set into the actual instruction set for that PC.
That allowed IBM to move from old bipolar cpus to the Power RISC cpus with 100% compatibility.
There isn't any reason why you couldn't do the same with Linux or Windows today.
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Alive and well never went out of style. (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Alive and well never went out of style. (Score:4, Informative)
There is a difference between a JIT compiler, a tokenized basic program, a byte code interpreter like P-Code and what IBM did.
This is from the Wikipedia.
"Additionally, the System/38 and its descendants are the only commercial computers ever to use a machine interface architecture to isolate the application software and most of the operating system from hardware dependencies, including such details as address size and register size. Compilers for System/38 and its successors generate code in a high-level instruction set (originally called MI for "Machine Interface", and renamed TIMI for "Technology Independent Machine Interface" for AS/400). MI/TIMI is a virtual instruction set; it is not the instruction set of the underlying CPU. Unlike some other virtual-machine architectures in which the virtual instructions are interpreted at runtime, MI/TIMI instructions are never interpreted. They constitute an intermediate compile time step and are translated into the processor's instruction set as the final compilation step. The MI/TIMI instructions are stored within the final program object, in addition to the executable machine instructions. If a program is moved from a processor with one native instruction set to a processor with another native instruction set, the MI/TIMI instructions will be re-translated into the native instruction set of the new machine before the program is executed for the first time on the new machine."
As you can see it is brilliant idea. If Microsoft had used it for Windows Apps way back when then NT on the Alpha, MIPS, and the PPC might have actually been very useful. Oh and Intel would have been a very unhappy camper.
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Re:Perhaps the way to other things besides compile (Score:5, Interesting)
This is interesting. Note that the industry (or parts of it, anyhow) is salivating about a move in precisely the opposite direction. VMware in specific and virtualization in general promises software manufacturers the ability to ship VMs with their software on it. Allowing them to write for only ONE, non-existent machine.
If this tech you're thinking about came to pass, the pendulum would have to swing mighty far back.
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the pendulum would have to swing mighty far back.
How many times have you seen a program packaged with it's own virtual machine image? I sure haven't seen many. The pendulum has hardly begun to swing.
That said, I think it'll be a very long time before we have AI smart enough to rewrite program blobs written for one operating system into programs for another operating system. Bytecode requires zero AI and is already gaining significant ground.
Calling this AI is overhype... and its not new (Score:5, Informative)
This is not really AI. Basically it is iteratively trying a bunch of compiler options to see which gives the best result, then storing those for the future.
Greenhills software has provided tools that do this, and more, for many years now. Drop some code, or your project, into the optimizer, setting what critera you want to optimise for (speed, size,...) and the optimiser will successively build and test the project on a simulator and find the best configuration. This is great form embedded systems where there is often a trade off and typical criteria would be (give me the fastest code that fits in the flash).
Genetic algorithms could take this a step further and very interesting work has been done to get GA to design antennas.
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Aw man... (Score:5, Funny)
end sarcasm
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Just optimisation? (Score:3, Insightful)
This could be big.
Compilers aren't programmed to be viral or reproductive, but could be, even being capable of testing their offspring (compilers they've compiled) for defects.
This could be a big step forward to self-improving AI.
Missing tag (Score:3, Funny)
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We can only hope.
How about calling it... (Score:3, Funny)
...artificial intelligent design? Should be big with the anti-evolution crowdlet... :P
np: The Orb - Toxygene (Kris Needs Up For A Fortnight Mix) (Orblivion Versions)
Iterative Compiling. Is anyone else disturbed?? (Score:2, Interesting)
The main barrier to its wider use is the currently excessive compilation and execution time needed in order to optimize each program
I suppose allowing AI to control some of the compiler options isn't really a bad idea, but implementing it by iteratively compiling a program seems silly to me. From the article i get the impression that it will basically adapt the compiler to one set of hardware (wherever it is run on) but that it will not adaptively compile new programs in novel ways, it simply remembers the set of compiler options that works best for your hardware. Interesting, b
Learning (Score:5, Interesting)
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Further, you can reorder these optimisations, which really does give different results. All this combines to give a huge optimisation space which is suitable for tackling with machine learning.
How far can we take AI? (Score:2, Interesting)
What I would really like to see is more AI used to help users in a variety of fields both within the program workings itself (computer side), as well as on the design of the actual content (user side).
We already have things like predictive texting, spellcheck, grammar check, and debuggers that attempt to aid in the creation process, but how far could this be developed? After all, in most computer-related work outside of multimed
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Press Release != "WSJ is reporting" (Score:2)
The Wall Street Journal makes press releases available for companies listed in its Company Research pages. The PR departments of these companies write the press releases, not WSJ reporters.
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The Wall Street Journal makes press releases available for companies listed in its Company Research pages. The PR departments of these companies write the press releases, not WSJ reporters.
Good point! Here's the press release. [ibm.com]
Future bug report... (Score:2, Funny)
...after AI/GCC integration:
"Today's build running 50% slower -- the compiler was in a bad mood."
The Real Issue (Score:2)
Imperative programming is still about telling the computer exactly what steps to perform. Especially when dealing with C and C++, your code is very explicit about memory moves, how to iterate loops, etc.
If we can communicate our programs to the machine at higher levels of abstraction (perhaps goal-oriented instead of "Here is a list of steps to run") then the machine wouldn't have to reverse engineer from these manual steps into faster equivalents, or frob around with optimization settings. It could simpl
GCC/AI (Score:5, Funny)
What about making the *programs* 10% faster (Score:3, Insightful)
Honestly, who really cares about 10% speedup in gcc ? Do they compare their results with competing compilers (Intel, MS, etc.) ? If you ask me, I would much rather have 10% speed improvement on programs I compile.
It's a way to evaluate optimization effectiveness. (Score:4, Insightful)
This isn't really "AI". It's basically a way of feeding measured performance data back into the compiler. Intel compilers for embedded CPUs have been doing that for years.
With modern superscalar CPUs, it's not always clear whether an optimization transformation is a win or a lose. This varies with the implementation, not the architecture. For some x86 CPUs, unrolling a loop is a win; for others, it's a lose. Whether it's a win or a lose may depend on details of the loop and of the CPU implementation, like how much register renaming capacity the CPU has.
Whether this is a good idea, though, is questionable. You can get an executable very well tuned to a given CPU implementation, but run it on a different CPU and it may be worse than the vanilla version. MIPS machines (remember MIPS?) can get faster execution if the executable is complied for the specific target CPU, not the generic MIPS architecture. This effect is strong enough that MIPS applications tended to come with multiple executables, any of which would run on any of MIPS machines, but would work better if the executable matched. This is a pain from a distribution and development standpoint.
The embedded community goes in for stuff like this, but that's because they ship the CPU and the code together and know it matches. For general-use software, a 10% speed improvement probably isn't worth the multiple version headache.
Also, if you have multiple versions for different CPUs, some bugs may behave differently on different CPUs, which is a maintenance headache.
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Amusing story, though not relevant to anything.
I was at a student physics conference in the early '90s. The presenter had an acronym that expanded 3 levels deep. Of course, one of the letters in the 3rd level was "L" for laser, which I pointed out was also an acronym (which most of the physicists had forgotten about), so it became 4-deep.
I wish I could remember what the full expansion was, but a 5 character (or so)
Re:Would you mind telling me (Score:4, Funny)
I think I still have a copy of DICNAVAB lurking around the house somewhere, left over from my days in the United States Navy. For the uninitiated, DICNAVAB is, obviously, the proper abbreviated name of the wonderful and informative "Dictionary of Naval Abbreviations".
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Re:I, for one, (Score:5, Insightful)
I, for one, welcome our new optimizing, embedded program compiling AI overlords!
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Re:I, for one, (Score:4, Funny)
I, for one, welcome our new humorless slashdot moderating overlords!
You go for funny and get "insightful", the GP oes for funny and gets "offtopic". Now watch, they'll mod this one "funny".
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Re:I, for one, (Score:5, Insightful)
"Funny" doesn't give karma, insightful does. That's why you sometimes see Funny posts moderated insightful.
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That's insightful, but the cosmic balance would be better served if you were in fact moderated funny ;-)
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