Abstract
The end of Dennard's scaling, coupled with the necessity to keep increasing computational performance in constrained power envelopes, is leading developers towards the need to optimize applications not only for performance, but also for energy consumption. In such a scenario, solutions that enable estimating performance and energy consumption of a program as early as possible, even during development and without the necessity to access the final target hardware, can become fundamental tools to reduce the design space, the optimization effort, and provide potential opportunities to automate the optimization process itself. In this position paper, we discuss the design of a performance and energy estimation framework based on a retargetable compiler. Our proposed approach targets the Intermediate Representation (IR) of the LLVM compiler. The IR based approach enables, after a model is built, estimation from a host different from the target architecture, even considering dynamic information. We present the rationale behind such a framework, identify opportunities and components readily available (such as static analysis, quick ways to add instrumentation for dynamic profiling, and the multiple backends), and aspects that still need further research efforts (such as more effective non-linear, or machine learning based models). We also discuss a hand-developed case study, based on a simple sparse matrix vector multiplication with a linear model, to motivate the needs for such a framework.