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This is the home page of the SPIRAL project. The goal of SPIRAL is to push the limits of automation in software and hardware development and optimization for digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms and other numerical kernels beyond what is possible with current tools.

Our basic research question is

Can we teach computers to write fast libraries?

Our flagship is the SPIRAL program generation system, which, entirely autonomously, generates platform-tuned implementations of signal processing transform such as the discrete Fourier transform, discrete cosine transform, and many others. Look at a few recent benchmarks. But we also provide other online generators (see the right column).

SPIRAL addresses one of the current key problems in numerical software and hardware development: how to achieve close to optimal performance with reasonable coding effort? (More detailed problem statement.)

SPIRAL comprises an interdisciplinary team of researchers in the areas of signal processing, algorithms, scientific computing, compilers, computer architecture, and mathematics.

Current Research Threads

• Complete redesign of our program generator for DSP transforms
• DFT IP generation for FPGAs
• Structured LDPC codes on FPGAs
• Adaptive sorting library
• Program generation for the all-pairs shortest path problem
• Fast and adaptive implementation of the backprojection algorithm
• Code generation for Viterbi decoding
• Multiplierless multiplier blocks (single and multiple constants)

SPIRAL Overview Paper (Good Choice for Citing)

• Markus Püschel, José M. F. Moura, Jeremy Johnson, David Padua, Manuela Veloso, Bryan Singer, Jianxin Xiong, Franz Franchetti, Aca Gacic, Yevgen Voronenko, Kang Chen, Robert W. Johnson, and Nick Rizzolo
  SPIRAL: Code Generation for DSP Transforms
  Proceedings of the IEEE special issue on "Program Generation, Optimization, and Adaptation," Vol. 93, No. 2, 2005, pp. 232-275

After this paper we started to attack all forms of parallel platforms. Check out benchmarks or learn about the current Spiral system.

Here is a recent talk (February 2007).

Recent Papers

• Peter A. Milder, Franz Franchetti, James C. Hoe and Markus Püschel
  Formal Datapath Representation and Manipulation for Implementing DSP Transforms
  to appear in Proc. Design Automation Conference (DAC), 2008
• Yevgen Voronenko and Markus Püschel
  Generating Parallel Adaptive Libraries for Linear Transforms
  submitted for publication
• Sung-Chul Han, Markus Püschel and Rohit Negi
  A Flexible Decoder for Quasi-Cyclic LDPC Codes
  submitted for publication
• Franz Franchetti and Markus Püschel
  Generating SIMD Vectorized Permutations
  to appear in Proc. International Conference on Compiler Construction (CC), 2008
• Srinivas Chellappa, Franz Franchetti and Markus Püschel
  How To Write Fast Numerical Code: A Small Introduction
  to appear in Proc. Summer School on Generative and Transformational Techniques in Software Engineering, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, 2008
• Markus Püschel, Peter A. Milder, and James C. Hoe
  Permuting Streaming Data Using RAMs
  submitted for patent application

Online Generators

Online generators currently available

Example interface (click to go to the site)

Featured Result

DFT: Four-way vectorized, up to four-threads, "push-button" generated by Spiral. Result: up to 25 Gflop/s.

References

• Franz Franchetti, Yevgen Voronenko and Markus Püschel
  FFT Program Generation for Shared Memory: SMP and Multicore
  Proc. Supercomputing (SC), 2006

More benchmarks.

Contact

If you have questions or comments about SPIRAL or our work in general, please send email to help (at) spiral.net.

SPIRAL Team

Proceedings IEEE Special Issue

Program Generation, Optimization, and Adaptation

Other links:

• Becoming a student in Spiral
• Spiral Blog

visitors since July 2003

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