CSCD70 Compiler Optimization

Welcome everyone to CSCD70. The first lecture and tutorial will be on Jan. 9. We will be using Quercus and Piazza for important announcements and this webpage for uploading course materials (👉 the right sidebar), so please make sure that you check them regularly for any updates.

Syllabus

General Course Information

Instructor:

Professor Gennady Pekhimenko

Teaching Assistant:

Bojian Zheng

Lectures:

Mon. 1:00-3:00 p.m. AA 206

Tutorials:

Mon. 11:00-12:00 a.m. HW 402 [1]

Discussion Board:

https://piazza.com/utoronto.ca/winter2023/cscd70/home

[1]

Please make sure that you are enrolled in the tutorials. If, after Jan. 22 (the add/drop deadline) you are still not in a tutorial, please send an email to Jenn Chaskavich (jenn.chaskavich@utoronto.ca) and she will enroll you.

Course Description

The goal of this course is to introduce students to the theoretical and practical aspects of building optimizing compilers that effectively exploit modern architectures. The course will begin with the fundamentals of compiler optimization, and will build upon these fundamentals to address issues in state-of-the-art commercial and research machines. Topics include the followings: intermediate representations, basic blocks and control flow graphs, dataflow analysis, partial redundancy elimination, loop optimizations, register allocation, instruction scheduling, inter-procedural analysis, memory hierarchy optimizations, extracting parallelism, and dynamic optimizations. Students will implement significant optimizations within LLVM, a modern research compiler framework.

Prerequisites

This course is not supposed to be your first C/C++ course. Previous knowledge on compiler frontend is recommended but not required. If you feel uncertain about whether you are adequately prepared to take this class, please discuss this with the instructor.

Course Works and Grading

• Assignments (45%)

  A major focus of this course is the assignments. We prefer that you work in groups of two on the assignments. The assignments will contain both programming and theoretical questions. There will be three assignments, each worth 15% of your final grade. The first assignment will be distributed on Jan. 9 and it will introduce you to the LLVM compiler framework.

• Midterm (20%) and Final Exam (35%)

  There will be a midterm exam covering the first half of the course material and a final covering the whole. Both exams will be closed book, closed notes.