Getting Started with LLVM - Build Your Own Compiler (NHR-SW at NHR-NORD)

Event content

High-performance computing strives to make the most out of the available hardware. For this, optimizing-compilers are irreplaceable. They enable developers to write high-level, maintainable code that is compiled down to highly efficient architecture specific code.

Often, the compiler is viewed as a black hole of magic that no one should touch. But what if you were able to adapt your compiler and help it understand and thus optimize your code even better?

To help the compilers optimize scientific code even better, domain-specific languages are used to encode high-level domain knowledge into the compiler. The de facto standard infrastructure to build such compilers on, is the LLVM framework, used in industry and academia alike.

This workshop will provide you with a foundational understanding of how a compiler operates and how it optimizes code. With this knowledge, you will work on bite-sized hands-on tasks that will culminate in a compiler that optimizes your own C++-embedded domain-specific language.

Learning goal

• Understand parts of a compiler
• Understand the intermediate representation of a compiler
• Integrating a compiler instead of using it
• Constructing LLVM IR from an embedded C++ DSL
• Optimize the generated program with a domain-specific optimization

Information about the event

Max. participants

20

Requirements

LLVM and the hands-on material are built in C++, so you should bring some familiarity with the language. We will go through the material together, so bring your notebook. More details (e.g. link to a docker image) will be provided in the days before the workshop.

Speakers

Joachim Meyer