AUGEM:Automatically Generate High Performance Dense Linear Algebra Kernels on x86 CPUs

Basic Liner algebra subprograms (BLAS) is a fundamental library in scientific computing. In this paper, we present a template-based optimization framework, AUGEM, which can automatically generate fully optimized assembly code for several dense linear algebra (DLA) kernels, such as GEMM, GEMV, AXPY and DOT, on varying multi-core CPUs without requiring any manual interference from developers. In particular, based on domain-specific knowledge about algorithms of the DLA kernels, we use a collection of parameterized code templates to formulate a number of commonly occurring instruction sequences within the optimized low-level C code of these DLA kernels. Then, our framework uses a specialized low-level C optimizer to identify instruction sequences that match the pre-defined code templates and thereby translates them into extremely efficient SSE/AVX instructions. The DLA kernels generated by our template-based approach surpass the implementations of Intel MKL and AMD ACML BLAS libraries, on both Intel Sandy Bridge and AMD Piledriver processors.