Accelerator Compiler for the VENICE Vector Processor
Abstract
This paper describes the compiler design for VENICE, a new
soft vector processor (SVP). The compiler is a new back-end
target for Microsoft Accelerator, a high-level data parallel
library for C++ and C#. This allows us to automatically
compile high-level programs into VENICE assembly code,
thus avoiding the process of writing assembly code used by
previous SVPs. Experimental results show the compiler can
generate scalable parallel code with execution times that are comparable to hand-written VENICE assembly code. On
data-parallel applications, VENICE at 100MHz on an Altera DE3 platform runs at speeds comparable to one core of
a 3.5GHz Intel Xeon W3690 processor, beating it in performance on four of six benchmarks by up to 3.2%.