IBM Releases Open Source Machine Learning Compiler

sheepweevil writes "IBM just released Milepost GCC, 'the world's first open source machine learning compiler.' The compiler analyses the software and determines which code optimizations will be most effective during compilation using machine learning techniques. Experiments carried out with the compiler achieved an average 18% performance improvement. The compiler is expected to significantly reduce time-to-market of new software, because lengthy manual optimization can now be carried out by the compiler. A new code tuning website has been launched to coincide with the compiler release. The website features collaborative performance tuning and sharing of interesting optimization cases."

Comments

Re:Oh really?

[lee1026]

The last one is actually quite possible, and indeed is a huge area of compiler research.

Re:Few Questions for any programmers

[Anonymous Coward]

Classic examples:

• Replace a mod (e.g. x % 32) with a bitwise-and (e.g. x & 31) when the divisor is a power of two. Nearly every compiler does this now, but twenty years ago it was a common manual optimization trick.
• Replace a branch with an arithmetic operation that yields the same result.

  i < 0 ? -i : i

  vs

  cdq
  xor eax, edx
  sub eax, edx

Re:Oh really?

[DiegoBravo]

That kind of confusing summaries are too frequent that sometimes I go to RTFA!

Seriously, the summaries should be subject to moderation too (I don't know if the firehose thing lets do that.)