GNU Compiler Collection Optimized for Itanium 2-Based Systems

April 17, 2007; 03:20 AM
The Itanium® Solutions Alliance in collaboration with the Gelato Federation today announced improvements on the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for Intel® Itanium® 2 architecture. GCC is the standard compiler for GNU/Linux distributions and these compiler optimizations will lead to automatic improvements on thousands of applications and libraries provided by Linux distributions for Itanium® 2-based systems.

A portion of the GCC optimizations, superblock optimization work, was directly funded by the Itanium Solutions Alliance and enables developers to produce faster code for Intel Itanium 2 processors. The superblock improvements were coordinated at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), a Gelato member.

"Since its inception in 1990, the superblock technique has become arguably the most widely used profile-guided optimization framework in commercial compilers that exploit instruction-level parallelism,” stated Professor Wen-mei Hwu, head of the UIUC group conducting the work. “With the introduction of the superblock framework into GCC, we hope to facilitate a wave of GCC optimization work that will unleash the true performance potential of the Intel Itanium architecture for open-source applications."

Superblock formation improves the effectiveness of later optimizations by duplicating frequently executed portions of the program. Later optimizations specialize the duplicated sections of code and generate an improved instruction schedule for faster execution. Superblock optimization provides a 5 percent peak performance improvement, and a 2 percent average performance improvement on common compiler benchmarks. It also forms the basis for a class of similar optimizations that can be added in the future. Superblock optimizations are being reviewed for inclusion into GCC 4.3.

Improving GCC performance on Intel Itanium architecture is important in the acceleration of the processor's adoption in the broader Linux computing community. The GCC superblock optimization brings levels of compiler optimization to the open source community that have been available to users of Itanium-based commercial compilers, from Intel and others, for many years. The Itanium 2-based EPIC platform is unique because it relies far more on the compiler in comparison to other platforms.

Software availability for Itanium-based systems has doubled in the last twelve months to more than 12,000 applications from over 2,000 software vendors. To support this industry growth, the Itanium Solutions Alliance offers a suite of enabling programs, including Developer Days events, the Solutions Center Network, an Itanium Solutions Catalog, and the ISV Platform Expansion Program to facilitate porting of applications to Intel Itanium architecture.

About The Itanium Solutions Alliance

The Itanium Solutions Alliance was formed by leading enterprise and technical computing solutions providers to work together toward a common objective of transitioning the world to open, industry-standard solutions based on Intel Itanium architecture. Together with leading enterprise software and hardware providers, the Alliance is dedicated to accelerating the adoption and ongoing development of Itanium-based solutions. Its membership comprises some of the most influential companies in the computing industry. For more information, visit www.itaniumsolutionsalliance.org.

About The Gelato Federation

The Gelato Federation is the global technical community dedicated to advancing Linux on the Intel Itanium architecture through collaboration, education and leadership. Gelato members are suppliers and users of Linux and Intel Itanium processor technology with a shared goal of producing open-source solutions for academic, government and industrial high-performance computing users. The Gelato portal (http://www.gelato.org) serves as the primary channel for Federation business and collaborations. Information about Gelato members' software and solutions are available through the portal, and the community is welcome to participate and contribute.

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