Predicting the number of clock cycles a processor takes to execute a block of assembly instructions in steady-state (the throughput) is important for both compiler designers and performance engineers.
However, building an analytical model to do so is especially complicated in modern x86-64 Complex Instruction Set Computer (CISC) machines with sophisticated processor microarchitectures in that it is tedious, error-prone, and must be performed from scratch for each processor generation.
Ithemal is the first tool that learns to predict the throughput of a set of instructions. It does so more accurately than state-of-the-art hand-written tools currently used in compiler backends and static machine code analyzers. In particular, Ithemal has less than half the error of state-of-the-art analytical models (LLVM's llvm-mca and Intel's IACA).
We are building a programming language for manipulating topological spaces (such as real numbers or probability distributions) in a sound manner, where all functions are continuous.
A CSAIL study highlights why it is so challenging to program a quantum computer to run a quantum algorithm, and offers a conceptual model for a more user-friendly quantum computer.
