An Extensible Platform Description Language Supporting Retargetable Toolchains and Adaptive Execution

Abstract

XPDL is a modular, extensible platform description language for heterogeneous multicore systems and clusters. XPDL models provide metadata about hardware and installed system software that are relevant for adaptive static and dynamic optimizations of application programs and system settings for improved performance and energy efficiency. XPDL is based on XML and uses hyperlinks and inheritance to create modular, distributed libraries of platform models. We also provide a retargetable toolchain that browses and processes XPDL models and generates driver code for microbenchmarking to bootstrap empirical performance and energy models at deployment time. A C++ API enables convenient introspection of platform models, even at run-time, which allows for adaptive dynamic program optimizations such as tuned selection of implementation variants.