Design and Implementation of a Compiler for an XML-based Hardware Description Language to Support Energy Optimization

Abstract: GPU-based heterogeneous system architectures are popular as they combine the advantages of CPU with the benefits of GPU. Development of high-performance and power-efficient software for heterogeneous system architecture needs to take both hardware and software specifications into consideration, which leads the software development process to be more complicated. To simplify the software development process, Architecture Description Languages (ADLs) came out. By modeling the target architecture components into structural formats, programmers can adapt their software to the platforms which they used. XPDL is a modular and extensible XML-based platform description language which is mainly designed to support optimization.The purposes of this thesis are to design the query API (Application Programming Interface) and develop a compiler which translates the XPDL descriptors to libraries that implement the API to support programmers for the development of adaptive high-performance and energy-optimized software. In this thesis, we design and develop a compiler to generate the API according to the XPDL descriptors.The main workflow of the designed compiler is following: first, the toolchain validates the XPDL descriptors against XSDs. Second, it parses the descriptors into DOM trees and transforms them into XPDL model trees. Next, the compiler links all XPDL model trees together, which results in the intermediate representation (IR). Then, any unspecified node values which means the unknown attributes, are handled by microbenchmark generator and executor. In the end, the code generator generates the libraries which expose the API according to the information in the IR. Finally, a few example codes are discussed to show how the API can be used to develop performance adaptive applications on heterogeneous systems.