Experiences in Building a Composable and Functional API for Runtime SPIR-V Code Generation

Abstract

This paper presents the Beehive SPIR-V Toolkit; a framework that can automatically generate a Java composable and functional library for dynamically building SPIR-V binary modules. The Beehive SPIR-V Toolkit can be used by optimizing compilers and runtime systems to generate and validate SPIR-V binary modules from managed runtime systems, such as the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Furthermore, our framework is architected to accommodate new SPIR-V releases in an easy-to-maintain manner, and it facilitates the automatic generation of Java libraries for other standards, besides SPIR-V. The Beehive SPIR-V Toolkit also includes an assembler that emits SPIR-V binary modules from disassembled SPIR-V text files, and a disassembler that converts the SPIR-V binary code into a text file, and a console client application. To the best of our knowledge, the Beehive SPIR-V Toolkit is the first Java programming framework that can dynamically generate SPIR-V binary modules.

To demonstrate the use of our framework, we showcase the integration of the SPIR-V Beehive Toolkit in the context of the TornadoVM, a Java framework for automatically offloading and running Java programs on heterogeneous hardware. We show that, via the SPIR-V Beehive Toolkit, the TornadoVM is able to compile code 3x faster than its existing OpenCL C JIT compiler, and it performs up to 1.52x faster than the existing OpenCL C backend in TornadoVM.

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