Performance Visualizations using XML Representations

Intermediate representation forms the information exchanged among different passes of program compilation. The intermediate format proposed for extensibility and persistence is written in XML. In this way, the program transformations that were internal to compiler become visible. The hierarchical structure of XML makes a natural representation for the abstract syntax tree (AST). A compiler can parse the program source into IR, then output it as an XML document. Separated by orthogonal namespaces, other IRs are also presented in the same XML document, gathering program information such as dependence vectors, transforming matrices, iteration spaces dependence graphs and cache hints. This XML document can be exchanged between compiler and program visualizers for parallelism and locality.

The paper has been published in the IV'04 conference. It has been presented by Dr. Kristof Beyls.

Related topics

  • Cache Behaviour Visualizations
  • Loop Dependence Visualizations