PIPS: Automatic Parallelizer and Code Transformation Framework

Copyright (C) 1989-2016 MINES ParisTech

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PIPS is a source-to-source compilation framework for analyzing and transforming
C and Fortran programs.

The goal of the PIPS project is to develop a free, open and extensible
workbench for automatically analyzing and transforming scientific and signal
processing applications. The PIPS workbench is especially relevant for people
interested in whole program compilation, a.k.a. application compilation or
interprocedural compilation, reverse-engineering, program verification,
source-to-source program optimization and parallelization. Its interprocedural
analyses help with program understanding and with checking legality and impact
of automatic program transformations. These transformations are used to reduce
the execution cost and latency, as well as the optimization cost itself. They
can also be used to support or ease code debugging and maintenance, and to
check and enforce coding rules.

Techniques developed for PIPS can be re-used for signal processing code written
in C, because pointers, data structures and dynamic allocation are not used
much, and for Java code optimization because array boundary checking must be
minimized conservatively.

PIPS is a free open workbench which has been used as support to develop new
analyses or program transformations by several teams from MINES ParisTech (the
initiator of the project in 1988!), CEA-DAM, Southampton University, TÉLÉCOM
Bretagne, Telecom SudParis, SRU (Slippery Rock University), HPC Project, RPI
(Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) and ENS Cachan. These new developments
benefit at no cost from the general infrastructure and from already available
analyses and transformations. PIPS has also been used to develop a HPF
prototype compiler and to study optimizations for HPF.

PIPS is not primarily designed to support compiler back-end research like SUIF
but is much better as a C and Fortran source-to-source tool because the data
types (e.g. complex) the code structures, the comments and, to some extent, the
initial statement numbers are preserved. However, PIPS can be used to generate
assembly code by lowering and specializing the interal representation.

PIPS used to stand for the French Parallélisation Interprocédurale de Programme
Scientifiques but can also be understood now as Programming Integrated Parallel
System or Parallelization Infrastructure for Parallel Systems.