About Us - The Past
The Instruction-Level Parallel Processing Era
The IMPACT research group was established in 1987, when the rapid
increase in hardware execution resources had created pressing needs for instruction-level
parallelizing compilers. Many well-known researchers, using the output of the then
mainstream compilers, announced very pessimistic projections of the amount of instruction-level
parallelism available to future microprocessors. If not addressed, this shortfall
in compiler technology could seriously limit the long term growth of microprocessor
performance. Wen-mei Hwu and his students rose to the challenge by constructing
a revolutionary compiler infrastructure called IMPACT. And we became known
as the IMPACT Group.
For this pioneering work on the IMPACT compiler, Wen-mei Hwu received HKN's
Outstanding Young Electrical Engineer Award in 1993 and ACM SIGARCH's inaugural Maurice
Wilkes award in 1998.
IMPACT (Illinois Microarchitecture Project Utilizing Advanced Compiler
Technology) used engineering prototypes to show that compilers can generate efficient
code with far more parallelism than anyone ever thought possible. Wen-mei and his
students published seminal papers on the "superblock"
and "hyperblock" structures, which enable a compiler to parallelize code across
complex control structures through a clever combination of code replication and
code predication. When combined with aggressive function inlining and memory dependence
analysis, algorithms based on superblocks and hyperblocks increased parallelism
in the output code and maintained efficiency.
Our group's work with instruction-level parallelism, also known as Explicitly Parallel
Instruction Computing (EPIC), spawned generations of new research in program analysis,
recognizing that the compiler must have comprehensive knowledge about program control
and memory access to make the sweeping transformations necessary for high performance.
During this era, we published many papers on various types of analysis, including
highly accurate and highly efficient predicate
analysis and pointer analysis. This work,
combined with the application knowledge gained from years of work in ILP, has led
naturally to the IMPACT Group's current research, in which we are
defining sweeping program transformations for ultra-efficient computing.
A series of national awards recognized the tremendous technical contributions by
the grad students of the IMPACT Group. Check the 2004 ACM/IEEE
International Symposium on Computer Architecture paper
by Sias et al. for a critical evaluation of the technical contributions of the IMPACT
Group during the instruction-level parallel processing era.