HPVM: A Portable Virtual Instruction Set for Heterogeneous Parallel Systems

Abstract: We describe a programming abstraction for heterogeneous parallel hardware, designed to capture a wide range of popular parallel hardware, including GPUs, vector instruction sets and multicore CPUs. Our abstraction, which we call HPVM, is a hierarchical dataflow graph with shared memory and vector instructions. We use HPVM to define both a virtual instruction set (ISA) and also a compiler intermediate representation (IR). The virtual ISA aims to achieve both functional portability and performance portability across heterogeneous systems, while the compiler IR aims to enable effective code generation and optimization for such systems. HPVM effectively supports all forms of parallelism used to achieve computational speedups (as opposed to concurrency), including task parallelism, coarse-grain data parallelism, fine-grain data parallelism, and pipelined parallelism. HPVM also enables flexible scheduling and tiling: different nodes in the dataflow graph can be mapped flexibly to different combinations of compute units, and the graph hierarchy expresses memory tiling, essential for achieving high performance on GPU and CPU targets.