Yagami Website

Open source is increasingly important to many organizations' smart technology strategies. Two new offerings from IBM Research and the Milepost consortium aim to make it even smarter.

The Milepost GCC open-source machine learning compiler lets users develop, test and optimize applications up to 10 times faster than current tools, according to partners. (Note: IBM sponsors Smarter Technology but does not control editorial content.) The first-of-its-kind offering, hailed as “the world’s first intelligent, open-source compiler” debuted June 25.

“Our technology automatically learns how to get the best performance from the hardware—whether mobile phones, desktops or entire systems, the software will run faster and use less energy," Bilha Mendelson, manager of code optimization technologies at IBM Research Haifa, said in the release. "We opened the compiler environment so it can access artificial intelligence and machine learning guidance to automatically determine exactly what specific optimizations should be used and when to apply them to ramp up performance."

Also introduced: a companion “Collective Tuning Center”—a collaborative community portal dedicated to creating software more quickly. Users share optimization best practices, organizer said, and development of common R&D tools with open APIs aimed at automating program optimization, compiler design and architecture tuning using empirical, statistical and machine learning techniques.

The project consortium includes the IBM Haifa Research Lab, Israel; the University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom; ARC International, United Kingdom; CAPS Enterprise, France; and INRIA, France.

The offerings are noteworthy for several reasons. They can potentially:

Speed SW roll out and enterprise innovation. The universal mandate to “do more with less” has expanded to “faster too.” As the developers note: In many organizations, software developers are fast becoming the nucleus of innovation, crucial to all business processes. They build the services and capabilities that will underlie future revenue and generate business opportunity.

Ease strains on IT resources. The average enterprise devotes 30 percent to 50 percent of its entire technology infrastructure to the development and testing of software, the partners said. Anything that reduces that burden frees precious resources for higher-value work.

Advance intelligent software development. What we’re talking about here is the shift from specialized compilers to automated code optimization. Unlike commercial compilers, The Milepost GCC uses machine learning to automatically optimize programs for reconfigurable heterogeneous embedded processors. Leveraging AI is a potentially important and long overdue way to combat the twin challenges of increasing development time and power usage and decreasing performance. Milepost could spark renewed interest in the long-overdue practical application of AI in code development.

Shorter software development times, bigger performance gains. What’s not to like? Intelligent compilers may not be the sexiest new smart technology. But history shows that big technology advances often are hidden under the hood. Hopefully Milepost will prove the first marker on a long new road to better, faster, greener software development.