Performance‐driven instrumentation and mapping strategies using the LARA aspect‐oriented programming approach

Abstract

Summary The development of applications for high‐performance embedded systems is a long and error‐prone process because in addition to the required functionality, developers must consider various and often conflicting nonfunctional requirements such as performance and/or energy efficiency. The complexity of this process is further exacerbated by the multitude of target architectures and mapping tools. This article describes LARA, an aspect‐oriented programming language that allows programmers to convey domain‐specific knowledge and nonfunctional requirements to a toolchain composed of source‐to‐source transformers, compiler optimizers, and mapping/synthesis tools. LARA is sufficiently flexible to target different tools and host languages while also allowing the specification of compilation strategies to enable efficient generation of software code and hardware cores (using hardware description languages) for hybrid target architectures – a unique feature to the best of our knowledge not found in any other aspect‐oriented programming language. A key feature of LARA is its ability to deal with different models of join points, actions, and attributes. In this article, we describe the LARA approach and evaluate its impact on code instrumentation and analysis and on selecting critical code sections to be migrated to hardware accelerators for two embedded applications from industry. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Programming Strategies for Contextual Runtime Specialization

“…Despite having mechanisms to use runtime information by offline code injection [4], the original LARA approach is not completely suitable for dynamic adaptation. Hence, we are currently extending the LARA language with features in order to specify dynamic weaving strategies.…”

LARA as a language-independent aspect-oriented programming approach

“…We consider that two of the main challenges of a language-agnostic approach are how to specify, in a target-independent way, 1) queries of specific points in the code and 2) additional behavior for the target language. Previous work on the LARA language [4,5] provides a solution for the first challenge, which is briefly presented in Section 3.1.…”

AutoTuning and Adaptivity appRoach for Energy Efficient eXascale HPC Systems: The ANTAREX Approach

“…LARA [8,9] is an AOP approach to developers to capture nonfunctional requirements and concerns in the form of strategies, which are decoupled from the functional description of the application. Compared to other approaches that usually focus on code injection (e.g., [10] and [11]), LARA provides access to other types of actions, e.g., code refactoring and inclusion of additional information.…”