Beehive SPIR-V Toolkit: A Composable and Functional API for Runtime SPIR-V Code Generation

Abstract

The Standard Portable Intermediate Representation (SPIR-V) is a low-level binary format designed for representing shaders and compute kernels that can be consumed by OpenCL for computing kernels, and Vulkan for graphics rendering. As a binary representation, SPIR-V is meant to be used by compilers and runtime systems, and is usually performed by C/C++ programs and the LLVM software and compiler ecosystem. However, not all programming environments, runtime systems, and language implementations are C/C++ or based on LLVM.

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. 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. 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, 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.

Pre-print: PDF

Code: Link

Bibtex:

@inproceedings{10.1145/3623507.3623555,
    author = {Fumero, Juan and Rethy, Gy\"{o}rgy and Stratikopoulos, Athanasios and Foutris, Nikos and Kotselidis, Christos},
    title = {Beehive SPIR-V Toolkit: A Composable and Functional API for Runtime SPIR-V Code Generation},
    year = {2023},
    isbn = {9798400704017}, 
    publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
    address = {New York, NY, USA},
    url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3623507.3623555},
    doi = {10.1145/3623507.3623555},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Virtual Machines and Intermediate Languages},
    pages = {61--72},
    numpages = {12},
    keywords = {SPIR-V, Java, Runtime Code Generation, API, Metaprogramming, Library},
    location = {Cascais, Portugal},
    series = {VMIL 2023}
}