O'Boyle, Michael

Polgreen, Elizabeth

De Souza Magalhães, José Wesley

2026-06-01T13:20:36Z

2026-06-01

The fast evolution of computer architectures brings the promise of increased performance. To leverage these advances and achieve high-performance, leg- acy code must be ported to new hardware. However, emerging hardware is increasingly complex and specialized, making the task of porting code highly challenging. Compilers must have a solid knowledge of the target architecture to generate efficient code, and developing such compilers for each new device is prohibitively costly in a scenario of rapid and constant change. New hardware is often programmed by specific interfaces or higher-level domain-specific languages (DSLs). DSLs embed knowledge about the applic- ation’s domain which is crucial for optimization. Hence, automatic translation or lifting of existing programs to hardware-oriented languages can bridge the gap between legacy implementations and unseen architectures and improve code portability. This thesis presents new solutions to automatically porting existing code to new architectures with Program Lifting: the translation of general-purpose code to higher-level application programming interfaces (APIs) or DSLs. It presents lifting techniques in the context of dense and sparse linear/tensor algebra, the fundamental blocks of many modern workloads, such as data science and ma- chine learning. This thesis shows that program lifting facilitates portability of code, enabling enormous performance gains on specialized hardware.

https://era.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/44777

https://doi.org/10.7488/era/7291

en

The University of Edinburgh

TENSORIZE: Fast synthesis of Tensor programs from legacy code using symbolic tracing, sketching and solving Brauckmann, A., Jaulmes, L., de Souza Magalhães, J. W., Polgreen, E. & O'Boyle, M. F. P., 1 Mar 2025, CGO '25: Proceedings of the 23rd ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), p. 15-30 16 p. (Proceedings of the CGO)

Guided tensor lifting Li, Y., De Souza Magalhães, J. W., Brauckmann, A., O'Boyle, M. F. P. & Polgreen, E., 13 Jun 2025, Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages. Hicks, M. (ed.). PLDI ed. New York, NY, United States: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Vol. 9. p. 1984-2006 23 p. 227. (Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages)

C2TACO: Lifting Tensor Code to TACO De Souza Magalhães, J. W., Woodruff, J., Polgreen, E. & O'Boyle, M. F. P., 22 Oct 2023, GPCE 2023: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Generative Programming: Concepts and Experiences. ACM, p. 42–56 15 p

Compilers

Program Lifting

Tensor Algebra

Program lifting for acceleration

Thesis

Doctoral

PhD Doctor of Philosophy