Library Function Selection in Compiling Octave

One way to address the continuing performance problem of high-level domain-specific languages, such as Octave or Matlab, is to compile them to a relatively lower level language for which good compilers are available. As a first step in this direction, specializing the high-level operations in the source, based on operand types, leads to significant gains. However, simple translation of the high-level operations to the underlying libraries can often miss important opportunities to improve performance. This paper presents a global algorithm to select functions from a target library, utilizing the semantics of the operations as well as the platform-specific performance characteristics of the library. Making use of the library properties, the simple and easy-to-implement selection algorithm, is able to achieve as much as three times performance improvement for certain linear algebra kernels, over a straight mapping of operations, which are compiled to the vendor-tuned BLAS.