Blackbird^® - HPEC Compiler

A commercially-solid, ANSI compliant, full featured, supercomputer class compiler adaptable to embedded processors.

Advanced embedded applications such as signal processing and gaming are placing ever-greater demands on compilers. With high degrees of on-chip parallelism and novel architectures - essentially supercomputers on a chip - embedded hardware is outpacing the performance improvement of general purpose processors. Applications are demanding this performance, and at substantially improved levels of power efficiency. The growth in hardware potential and application demands places the compiler in a critical role.

To achieve good utilization of highly parallel functional units requires not only advanced code generators, but also advanced middle-phase dependence analysis and program transformations. What is needed is a well-engineered commercially-solid compiler base with infrastructure for accepting extensions and modifications to broaden its functionality. The Blackbird compiler is just such a product. Additional Background

Blackbird descends from SGI's highly regarded MIPSPro compiler. Blackbird features a full set of both conventional and cutting-edge optimizations, including interprocedural optimizations, loop nest optimizers, a mechanism for feedback, automatic parallelization, and a world-class software pipeliner. Blackbird's EDG-powered front-end supports C (including the C99 standard and many GNU extensions) and C++. The back-end supports RISC, VLIW, and superscalar targets using a modular architecture description facility. Blackbird's modular design with a well-documented intermediate representation facilitates the development of new optimizations. The extensive testing and engineering in Blackbird enables developers to focus on the extensions, rather than on building a complete compiler from scratch.

The Blackbird compiler is the product of over 200 person-years of engineering at SGI. The code base is exceptionally well documented, clean, and stable. Its optimizations have been tested and honed on a substantial set of industrial applications, resulting in consistently good performance. Blackbird is designed to provide an optimal combination of speed, reliability, and correctness within the most demanding of commercial settings.

Available under a variety of licensing plans with extensive customer support and customization options.

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