The design of the PROMIS compiler

PROMIS is a multilingual, parallelizing, and retargetable compiler with an integrated frontend and backend operating on a single unified/universal intermediate representation This paper describes the organization and the major features of the PROMIS compiler. PROMIS exploits multiple levels of static and dynamic parallelism, ranging from task- and loop-level parallelism to instruction-level parallelism, based on a target architecture description. The frontend and the backend are integrated through a unified internal representation common to the high-level, the low-level, and the instruction-level analyses and transformations. The unified internal representation propagates hard to compute dependence information from the semantic rich frontend through the backend down to the code generator. Based on conditional algebra, the symbolic analyzer provides control sensitive and interprocedural information to the compiler. This information is used by other analysis and transformation passes to achieve highly optimized code. Symbolic analysis also helps statically quantify the effectiveness of transformations. The graphical user interface assists compiler development as well as application performance tuning.