Compiling APL to accelerate through a typed array intermediate language

We present an approach for compiling a rich subset of APL into dataparallel programs that can be executed on GPUs. The compiler is based on the APLTAIL compiler, which compiles APL programs into a typed array intermediate language, called TAIL [11]. We translate TAIL programs into Haskell source code, employing Accelerate [6], a Haskell-library for general purpose GPU-programming. We demonstrate the feasibility of the approach by presenting some encouraging results for a number of smaller benchmarks. We also outline some problems that we need to overcome in order for the approach to result in competitive code for larger benchmarks. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.3.2 [Programming Languages]: Language Classification—Applicative (functional) languages; Concurrent, distributed, and parallel languages Keywords APL compilation, Data parallelism, GPGPU

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: PLDI
• Authors: Michael Budde, Martin Dybdal, Martin Elsman
• Keywords: PLDI 2015, Programming Languages