OpenIMAPCT Front End 1.0rc4.1 released ( March 2 2007 )

OpenIMPACT Front End 1.0rc4.1 is now available on the download page. This fixes a bug where casts of pointer variables may not be correctly generated by the front end.

OpenIMPACT 1.0rc4 has been released ( March 18 2005 )

OpenIMPACT 1.0rc4 is now available on the download page.

Slides from the OpenIMPACT seminar for Gelato Meeting in Beijing, China ( October 25 2004 )

Slides from the OpenIMPACT seminar for Gelato meeting in Beijing are now available.

OpenIMPACT beta release now available ( September 17 2004 )

The first beta release of OpenIMPACT is now available!

Gelato members are invited to contact us for assistance compiling their applications with OpenIMPACT.

Visit our detailed information and software download sections

Documentation

Current Status

Software Releases

Frequently Asked Questions

Call for participation

We are expanding the set of programs built and optimized with OpenIMPACT. If your research would benefit from the optimization of any C programs that you run on IA-64 Linux machines, please contact us and we will help in any way we can. If there are particular parts of any mainstream or specialized library that are stressed particularly hard by your workload, we would also like to work with you to eliminate those bottlenecks.

Gelato Mailing Lists

The Gelato team at UNSW is hosting a number of Gelato discussion lists.
Please use the web interface to sign up and browse archives.

Proceedings of the 2002 Gelato Technical Workshop

The proceedings are now available.

Present and future of OpenIMPACT

In 2002, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign approved the release of the IMPACT Compiler into the open-source domain as part of the GELATO consortium effort (www.gelato.org). OpenIMPACT encompasses many of the advanced compilation techniques developed by the IMPACT research team, including programmatic logic analysis, predicated compilation, interprocedural pointer analysis, instruction-level parallelism optimizations, profile-based optimization, and speculative hyperblock acyclic and modulo scheduling. Due to its heritage as a research compiler, OpenIMPACT is designed to achieve maximal output code performance with little concern for compilation time and compiler memory usage. Thus, the OpenIMPACT engineering team can contribute to the GELATO community by producing high-performance software object code using OpenIMPACT and computing resources at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Using this model, the OpenIMPACT team has produced applications and utilities executable binaries with record-setting performance on Itanium 2 platforms.

A major engineering effort is under way to make IMPACT fully compatible with GCC. This involves scripts and internal enhancements to allow OpenIMPACT to be invoked with GCC makefiles and command lines. The team is working towards compiling full Linux kernel, libraries, utilities, and applications with OpenIMPACT. The ultimate goal is to achieve the full performance potential of IPF processors when executing Linux kernel, library, utility, and application binary code in terms of execution speed and code size. A support infrastructure is also being established for the source built and released by the OpenIMPACT team.

Moving forward, the OpenIMPACT team will exploit some very exciting opportunities in the analysis and optimization of Linux infrastructure software. In particular, the OpenIMPACT team will focus on transferring advanced deep program analysis technology currently being developed by the IMPACT research team into tools for managing and optimizing very large Linux-based software systems. The deep program analysis technology will also enable new developer tools for software maintenance, debugging, and re-use. Please visit this site often to tune in to the latest developments in OpenIMPACT.

Please contact: Wen-mei Hwu
 

OpenIMPACT Technical Advisory Board

The OpenIMPACT Technical Advisory Board consists of prominent researchers and developers in the compiler domain. Please contact Wen-mei Hwu if you are interested in becoming a member of the OpenIMPACT Technical Advisory Board.

Current OpenIMPACT team

• Wen-mei Hwu is the leader of the OpenIMPACT team. He is responsible for the development of long-term strategy, core algorithms, and public communications for OpenIMPACT. He is the Franklin Woeltge Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Affiliate Professor of Computer Science, and a Research Professor of the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has been leading the IMPACT research team since its inception in 1987.
• John Sias is the compiler architect for OpenIMPACT. He oversees the transfer of research prototypes from the IMPACT Research Group into components of OpenIMPACT. John has published extensively in the area of compiler algorithms and computer architecture. He has been recognized with a prestigious National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship and a IBM Centre for Advanced Study Fellowship. He is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 
• Jose (Nacho) Navarro is an expert in Linux kernel and libraries. He is responsible for addressing OS-specific challenges in compiling, profiling, analyzing, and optimizing kernel code.
• Kevin Cernekee is a compiler engineer on the OpenIMPACT team. He is responsible for implementing software and procedures to streamline the development and testing processes, stress testing the compiler, and isolating bugs. Kevin brings a wealth of industrial-level Linux/UNIX software engineering and system management experience to OpenIMPACT. He has done development work in many diverse areas, including kernel enhancements, user-mode applications and utilities, embedded devices, and high level web application programming.
• Robert Kidd is a compiler engineer in the OpenIMPACT team. He is responsible for scripting drivers as well as back-end enhancements for increased GCC compatibility and compiler usability in general. While he was a student at the Computer Science Department, he received the campus-wide Student Employee of the Year Award for his outstanding work in network administration at the Coordinated Science Laboratory. Robert has a B.S. degree in Computer Science with Highest Honor from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
• Erik Nystrom is a senior researcher at the IMPACT research group. He is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His current research is in deep program analysis, focused on innovative pointer analysis techniques.

The IMPACT Research Group

The objective of IMPACT (Illinois Microarchitecture Project utilizing Advanced Compiler Technology) is to provide critical research, architecture expertise, and compiler prototypes for the microprocessor industry. This objective will be accomplished by analyzing and demonstrating the level of hardware and compiler support required by architectural enhancements in order to understand the cost and effectiveness of these enhancements. IMPACT's primary focus is on exposing, enhancing, and exploiting instruction-level parallelism (ILP).

The IMPACT project is part of the ongoing research being performed at the Center for Reliable and High-Performance Computing. We are located in the Coordinated Science Laboratory at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Previous Contributors to OpenIMPACT

OpenIMPACT incorporates a large amount of technical innovations and engineering efforts by many previous members of the IMPACT research team. To see a list previous IMPACT research team members, visit http://www.crhc.uiuc.edu/IMPACT/people/fmember.html.

The Research Team has produced some talks and papers :

Microprocessor Forum 2001 Presentation - Itanium Performance Insights:
(Slides: PDF version) (Handouts: PostScript version, PDF version)