Compiler techniques for MATLAB programs

This thesis addresses the issues of translating an interactive array language, such as MATLAB$\sp1$, into a traditional compiled language, such as Fortran, in order to achieve better performance. It describes the main techniques, developed for our MATLAB-to-Fortran 90 compiler, to extract information from the high-level semantics of MATLAB for the generation of high-performance code. To perform the translation, an inference mechanism is necessary to generate the declarations for a typed language, to select the appropriate functions and operations, and to allocate the necessary space. The inference mechanism developed for this MATLAB-to-Fortran 90 compiler combines static and dynamic inference methods for intrinsic type, shape, rank, and structural inference. This inference is enhanced with value propagation and symbolic-dimension propagation analyses. The experimental results, which compare compiled generated programs with the corresponding interpreted MATLAB execution, show that the compiler can generate code that performs more than 1000 times faster than MATLAB on an SGI Power Challenge, and as fast as the corresponding hand-written Fortran 90 programs. When compared with the performance of C-MEX files generated by the MathWorks MATLAB compiler, we observed that, for our tests, the Fortran 90 programs ran faster than the corresponding C-MEX programs on an SGI Power Challenge and on a Sun SPARCstation 10. This better performance is mainly attributed to our enhanced inference mechanism. ftn$\sp1$MATLAB is a trademark of The MathWorks, Inc.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2011

Author dc:creator

• De Rose, Luiz Antonio

Contributors dc:contributor

• Padua, David A.

• Computer Science

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 1996 De Rose, Luiz Antonio

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

9780591200171
AAI9712420
(UMI)AAI9712420

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/20204