University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
About IMPACT
The objective of IMPACT (Illinois Microarchitecture Project
utilizing Advanced Compiler Technology) is to provide critical
research, architecture expertise, and compiler prototypes for
the microprocessor industry. This objective is accomplished by
analyzing and demonstrating the level of hardware and compiler
support required by architectural enhancements in order to
understand the cost and effectiveness of these enhancements.
IMPACT's primary focus is on exposing, enhancing, and exploiting
instruction-level parallelism (ILP).
The IMPACT compiler framework was created by the
IMPACT research group
under the direction of
Professor Wen-mei
W. Hwu. The IMPACT research group is affiliated with the
Center for Reliable and
High-Performance Computing which is part of the
Coordinated Science Laboratory,
an interdisciplinary research organization at the
University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. Wen-mei Hwu is a Professor at the
Department of Electrical and
Computer Engineering. Graduate students from the IMPACT research
group are from either the Department of Electrical and Computer
Engineering or the
Department of Computer Science.
Details about IMPACT team members, past and present,
who developed this framework can be found at the IMPACT web page,
http://www.crhc.uiuc.edu/IMPACT.
Acknowledgments
The IMPACT public and Trimaran release effort (versions 1.00-2.33) was lead
by Professor John
Gyllenhaal.
He would like to thank Professor Wen-mei W. Hwu for encouraging
and supporting this release effort; Brian Deitrich and Daniel
Lavery for leading and coordinating the IMPACT beta releases
prior to May 1997; John Sias, Ben-Chung Cheng, Dan Connors,
Scott Mahlke,
David
August, Liesl Little, Matthew Merten, Andy Trick, Patrick
Eaton, Rick Hank, Le-Chun Wu, Qudus Olaniran, Sabrina
Hwu, and Jason Fritts for their extensive help in making these
releases stable and for graciously acting as sounding boards
even when they were extremely busy with their own research; and
the IMPACT compiler team in general for all of their
contributions, help, and support. He would also like to thank
all the Trimaran council members, especially Vinod Kathail, Ralph
Hyver, Tom Christian and Han-Soo
Kim, and the entire Trimaran team, especially Rodric Rabbah, for
their efforts to make the Trimaran release a success.
Brian Deitrich, Daniel Lavery, and John Gyllenhaal would also
like to thank the IMPACT public release beta testers for all
their feedback.
The IMPACT research group thanks the
National Science Foundation (NSF) for supporting a significant
portion of this release effort under grant CCR-9809404.
The IMPACT compiler framework is the result of numerous
research efforts by 45+ graduate students over the last ten
years. These research efforts were supported by the National
Science Foundation (NSF) under grants CCR-9809478, CCR-9629948,
MIP-930813, and MIP-8809478, Hewlett-Packard, Intel Corporation,
Advanced Micro Devices, Microsoft, SUN Microsystems, NCR, Mazda
Motor Corporation, Matsushita Electric Industrial Corporation,
Joint Services Engineering Programs (JSEP) under contract
N00014-90-J-1270, and the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA) under Contract NASA NAG 1-613 in
cooperation with the Illinois Computer Laboratory for Aerospace
Systems and Software (ICLASS).
The IMPACT compiler's C front end is built upon the Edison Design Group's C/C++ front
end (see
EDG_CTOP_LICENSE).
IMPACT's predicate analysis makes extensive use of the CUDD-2.2.0 package
developed at the University of Colorado at Boulder by Fabio
Somenzi.
The IMPACT compiler framework relies on the
portable Lcode (IMPACT's IR) emulator, platform info framework,
and the portability enhancements developed by IMPACT
Technologies, Inc. (see
ITI_LICENSE) to allow IMPACT's and Trimaran's IR to be
emulated on a wide variety of platforms.