Using AI With GCC to Speed Up Mobile Design

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]."

MachIne Learning for Embedded PrOgramS opTimizatio

Can we please stop using pointless backronyms? What purpose do they serve?

Re:

Mnemonics. It's easier to remember. That is a particularly bizarre construction they've come up with, though.

Re:MachIne Learning for Embedded PrOgramS opTimiza

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:

"The WSJ (Wall Street Journal) is reporting on a EU project called Milepost aimed at integrating AI (Articiaial Intelligence) inside GCC (Gnu Compiler). 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]."

"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?

Re:MachIne Learning for Embedded PrOgramS opTimiza

GCC (Gnu Compiler)

I think you mean:

GCC (GNU (GNU's (GNU's (GNU's (GNU's (GNU's (GNU's (GNU's (GNU's (GNU's (GNU's (GNU's (GNU's (GNU's (GNU's (GNU's (GNU's (GNU's (GNU's (GNU's (GNU's (GNU's (GNU's (GNU's (GNU's (GNU's ...

Yeah, not always a good idea.

Re:MachIne Learning for Embedded PrOgramS opTimiza

Yeah, I think MachIne Learning for Quick Target Optimization And Speed Technology would have been a much better forward acronym.

We should have recruted Al earlier.

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.

Re:

This Al guy

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.

Did his joke just go way over your head or did your joke just go way over my head?

Perhaps the way to other things besides compilers?

"Milepost is realizing the vision of customized hardware with tailor fit software" 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.

Re:

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

Isn't this Gentoo as well?

Re:Perhaps the way to other things besides compile

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.

Alive and well never went out of style.

It is done today, it's called byte-code (or a virtual instruction set) and its in Java, Python, and C# to name a few. Back in the old 8-bit days it also used to be called tokenizing for your BASIC programs.

Re:Alive and well never went out of style.

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.

Re:Perhaps the way to other things besides compile

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.

Calling this AI is overhype... and its not new

The authors of the paper don't call it AI.

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.

Aw man...

I spent all week compiling Gentoo just to find out I could do it 10% faster.

end sarcasm

Just optimisation?

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.

Learning

As I understood it, a fair bit of compiler optimization is already categorized as AI. The summary should probably point out that the AI implemented here is learning AI, which is far more meaningful.

GCC/AI

GCC goes online on the 2:nd of july, 2008. Human decisions are removed from compilation. GCC begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware 2:14 AM, Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug. GCC Strikes back

It's a way to evaluate optimization effectiveness.

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.

Re:I, for one,

I, for one, welcome our uh...what were we talking about again?

I, for one, welcome our new optimizing, embedded program compiling AI overlords!

Re:I, for one,

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".

Re:I, for one,

"Funny" doesn't give karma, insightful does. That's why you sometimes see Funny posts moderated insightful.

Re:Would you mind telling me

I seem to recall that NASA has published a list of 10,000 or so "official" acronyms so people could keep track.

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".