A global research community devoted to advancing Linux on Intel's 64-bit Itanium processor has formulated a plan to optimize the GNU Compiler Collection for Itanium. The Gelato Federation hashed out the plan at a January meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, attended by representatives of HP, Intel, and the GCC community.

According to the Federation, application performance on Itanium depends “far more” on the compiler than with other processors. Thus, the group hopes its optimizations will boost Itanium in the broader computing community, beyond high-performance computing, where Itanium has had trouble competing with 64-bit chips from AMD and Apple.

The Federation's plan includes:

• Superblock scheduling, expected to yield application performance gains between five and 10 percent
• Rotating register support, expected to yield gains between two and 30 percent
• Memory disambiguation, expected to yield gains up to 10 percent

Professor Wen-mei Hwu of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign explains, “We based our proposals on a combination of estimated benefit, effort to implement, and likelihood of GCC community acceptance. In addition, benefits were determined using other compilers that have already implemented the optimizations under consideration.”

Platforms other than Itanium will also benefit from the planned optimizations, the Federation believes.

Additional details about the Federation's GCC optimization plans can be found here.

The Gelato Federation was founded by HP in March of 2002.

 
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