Hydride: A Retargetable and Extensible Synthesis-based Compiler for Modern Hardware Architectures

As modern hardware architectures evolve to support increasingly diverse, complex instruction sets for meeting the performance demands of modern workloads in image processing, deep learning, etc., it has become ever more crucial for compilers to provide robust support for evolution of their internal abstractions and retargetable code generation support to keep pace with emerging instruction sets. We propose Hydride, a novel approach to compiling for complex, emerging hardware architectures. Hydride uses vendor-defined pseudocode specifications of multiple hardware ISAs to automatically design retargetable instructions for AutoLLVM IR, an extensible compiler IR which consists of (formally defined) language-independent and target-independent LLVM IR instructions to compile to those ISAs, and automatically generated instruction selection passes to lower AutoLLVM IR to each of the specified hardware ISAs. Hydride also includes a code synthesizer that automatically generates code generation support for schedule-based languages, such as Halide, to optimally generate AutoLLVM IR. Our results show that Hydride is able to represent 3,557 instructions combined in x86, Hexagon, ARM architectures using only 397 AutoLLVM IR instructions, including (Intel) SSE2, SSE4, AVX, AVX2, AVX512, (Qualcomm) Hexagon HVX, and (ARM) NEON vector ISAs. We created a new Halide compiler with Hydride using only a formal semantics of Halide IR, leveraging the auto-generated AutoLLVM IR and back-ends for the three hardware architectures. Across kernels from deep learning and image processing, this compiler is able to perform just as well as the mature, production Halide compiler on Hexagon, and outperform on x86 by 8% and ARM by 3%. Hydride also outperforms the production Halide's LLVM back end by 12% on x86, 100% on HVX, and 26% on ARM across the same kernels.