LLVM Support

The Chapel compiler uses LLVM support by default where possible. LLVM support enables the following features:

  1. extern block support (see C Interoperability). This feature uses the clang parser. Note that it is not necessary to use the LLVM code generator in order to use extern block support.

  2. LLVM code generator. The LLVM code generator is the default when the Chapel compiler is built with LLVM. It can be selected with CHPL_TARGET_COMPILER=llvm and toggled off with e.g. CHPL_TARGET_COMPILER=gnu.

  3. Experimental LLVM communication optimizations. You can activate these communication optimizations with --llvm-wide-opt. Some benchmark programs run faster with these LLVM communication optimizations.

Enabling the LLVM support

Please see Setting up Your Environment for Chapel for more information about enabling LLVM support. In many cases, it amounts to installing a compatible LLVM package and setting export CHPL_LLVM=system, and then rebuilding the compiler.

Note that, when using CHPL_LLVM=bundled, you can set the environment variable CHPL_LLVM_DEVELOPER to request a debug build of LLVM.

Compiling a program with an LLVM-enabled chpl will use the LLVM backend by default but this can be controlled with CHPL_TARGET_COMPILER e.g. with CHPL_TARGET_COMPILER=llvm and CHPL_TARGET_COMPILER=gnu.

Inspecting the Generated Code

It is possible to request output of the LLVM IR or assembly code generated by the compilation process. To do so, use the experimental --llvm-print-ir and --llvm-print-ir-stage flags.

  • --llvm-print-ir accepts a comma-separated list of function names to show

  • --llvm-print-ir-stage indicates which compiled form of the functions to show, where the options include:

    • none – LLVM IR without any LLVM optimization

    • basic – LLVM IR with basic LLVM optimization

    • full – LLVM IR with full LLVM optimization

    • asm – resulting assembly code (including all optimization)

    • every – show LLVM IR after every optimization pass possible

In addition, the LLVM IR can be explored if you pass –savec with a directory. In the passed directory, the LLVM backend will emit two .bc files:

  • chpl__module.bc is the version that will be linked

  • chpl__module-nopt.bc is the generated code without optimizations applied.

Optimization Options

Passing --fast will cause LLVM optimizations to run.

The --ccflags option can control which LLVM optimizations are run, using the same syntax as flags to clang.

Experimental optimization with --llvm-wide-opt

If you compile a program with the experimental flag --llvm-wide-opt --fast, you will allow LLVM optimizations to work with global memory. For example, the Loop Invariant Code Motion (LICM) optimization might be able to hoist an access of a remote variable - ie, a ‘get’ - out of a loop. This optimization has produced better performance with some benchmarks.

Please see LLVM-based Communication Optimizations for PGAS Programs by Hayashi et al. for more information about this flag and its implementation. Note that locality optimizations and transfer coalescing are not yet available in Chapel releases.

Caveats:

  • --llvm-wide-opt may add communication to or from a task’s stack, so it may not function correctly for combinations of tasking and communication layers in which some task has a stack outside of an acceptable region for communication. At this point all communication layers should support communication to or from a task’s stack, but it comes up rarely.

Communication optimization within LLVM uses the address space feature of LLVM in order to create a conceptual global address space. In particular, instead of generating a call to the runtime functions to ‘put’ or ‘get’, when --llvm-wide-opt is enabled, the Chapel compiler will generate a load, store, or memcpy using an address space 100 pointer. Address space 100 pointers represent global memory - and address space 0 pointers continue to represent local memory. The existing LLVM optimization passes will operate normally on these address space 100 operations. The LLVM documentation describes these optimizations and which are normally run.

Because it may be necessary to build a global pointer or to gather information from it - for example when constructing a global pointer from a node number and a local address, or extracting the node number or the address - the LLVM code generated with --llvm-wide-opt includes calls to nonexistent functions to mark these operations:

  • .gf.addr extracts an address from a global pointer

  • .gf.loc extracts a locale from a global pointer

  • .gf.node extracts a node number from a global pointer

  • .gf.make constructs a global pointer from a locale and an address

  • .gf.g2w converts a global pointer to a wide pointer

  • .gf.w2g converts a wide pointer to a global pointer

These functions will be replaced with the usual runtime functions once all global pointers are lowered into wide pointers by the global-to-wide pass.

After the usual LLVM optimization passes run, two Chapel LLVM passes run:

  • aggregate-global-ops bundles together sequences of loads or sequences of stores on adjacent global memory locations into a single memcpy. That way, adjacent loads will generate a single ‘get’ instead of several ‘get’ calls.

  • global-to-wide converts operations on address space 100 pointers, notably including load, store, memcpy, and memset operations, into calls to the Chapel runtime. It converts address space 100 pointers into packed pointers and any of the special function calls (e.g. .gf.addr to extract the local address portion of a global pointer) into the usual operations on a packed pointer. In the future, we would like to support converting address space 100 pointers into the usual Chapel wide pointer format.

Inspecting LLVM Optimizations

It may be useful to determine if specific LLVM optimizations ran and what the results were. LLVM remarks allow optimization passes to report what happened.

To request optimization remarks, use the experimental --llvm-remarks and --llvm-remarks-function flags.

  • --llvm-remarks accepts a regular expression which matches and filters optimization pass names.

    • '.'' – shows remarks for all optimization passes

    • inline – shows remarks for any optimization pass which matches ‘inline’

    • (slp|loop)-vectorize – shows remarks for any optimization pass which matches ‘slp-vectorize’ or ‘loop-vectorize’

  • --llvm-remarks-function accepts a comma-separated list of function names to show. Not passing this flag will show all functions

These flags are also affected by if -g is set or not and whether CHPL_DEVELOPER / --[no]-devel is set or not. Without -g, the ability of LLVM to map remarks back to Chapel source code is limited. The compiler makes a best effort attempt to get Chapel source code information. If the compiler is run in developer mode and no function filters are set, it will output remarks for all code including standard and internal modules. Otherwise remarks will be limited to user modules only.

Note

Introducing debug symbols with -g or changing the state of CHPL_DEVELOPER may change what optimizations can be done.