OPTIMIST Framework Download and Installation Guide

The OPTIMIST framework with complete source code and example xADML specifications for ARM9E, ARM9E Thumb, MC 56K DSP and TI C62x, installation guide and documentation, is available on this page.

System requirements, download and installation
Architecture specifications download
Documentation
Instructions for running OPTIMIST
License
Contact information

INSTALLATION

Requirements

In order to compile and use OPTIMIST you will need the following software:

OS: Linux, or Windows with Cygwin
Xerces-C++ XML Parser (home page) version 2.6.0
GNU gcc (home page) or Intel C++ compiler (home page)

The framework was successfully compiled with Intel 8.0 compiler and GNU gcc 3.4.3 and 4.0.2. It was tested on Linux and on Windows machines under cygwin.

Remark: The OPTIMIST distributions includes the LCC compiler 4.2. You can download the official LCC version from the LCC home page.

Download

It would be interesting for us to know who downloads and uses OPTIMIST.
Please send a short email to Christoph Kessler (chrke@ida.liu.se).
If you wish to be informed about future new releases of OPTIMIST, please let us know.

OPTIMIST framework (Release notes)

Current version 0.4 (19 Feb 2009) download:
- optimist_2009-02-19.tar.bz2
Version 0.3 (19 April 2006):
- optimist_v0.3.tar.gz
- optimist_v0.3.zip

Version 0.2 (.tar.gz format download, .zip format download)

Version 0.1 (.tar.gz format download, .zip format download)

ILP Model for OPTIMIST-version 0.3
Needed if the ILP optimization engine should be used instead of the dynamic programming engine in OPTIMIST.
In that case, you will also need CPLEX and AMPL.

ILP model v. 0.1 (download)

Installation

Unpack the source file into a directory. OPTIMIST will need to refer to that directory, which is done by mapping it to an environment variable $OPTROOT. For instance, if that directory is /home/agina/src/optimist, make the variable $OPTROOT point to that directory:

bash: export OPTROOT=/home/agina/src/optimist

tcsh: setenv OPTROOT /home/agina/src/optimist

Also, the following environment variable should be set: tcsh: export XERCESCROOT=/usr/local/xerces-gcc-2.7.0

To compile the OPTIMIST framework into /home/agina/build/opt (make sure that this directory exists), issue the following make command:

make BUILDDIR=/home/agina/build/opt HOSTFILE=etc/linux.c -C $OPTROOT/lcc-4.2 -f ../optcg/makefile.opt

ARCHITECTURE SPECIFICATIONS

OPTIMIST is a retargetable framework. The processor architecture is specified using our xADML specification language. We provide three example specifications: for the ARM9E processor (David Landén's master thesis), the Motorola DSP 56K processor (Yuan Yongyi's master thesis), and the Texas Instruments TI-C62x clustered VLIW DSP family (prototype):

Motorola DSP 56x (work in progress, download m56x_v0.1a.xml):
Note: The specification does not yet use the Motorola parallelism feature (i.e., the issue width of maximum 3 instructions per clock cycle). This should be fixed shortly.
ARM9E - ARM mode (currently under conversion to new xADML format)
ARM9E - Thumb mode (currently under conversion to new xADML format)
TI-C62x (download c62x.xml)

DOCUMENTATION

We recommend Andrzej Bednarski's PhD thesis as comprehensive documentation of the (2006) prototype version:

Andrzej Bednarski: Optimal Integrated Code Generation for Digital Signal Processors. PhD thesis, Linköping university - Institute of Technology, Linköping, Sweden, June 2006.
See especially Chapter 8 for a comprehensive description of xADML,
and Chapter 7 for a description of the ILP model.

The xADML specification for ARM9E is described in

D. Landen: ARM9E Processor Specification for OPTIMIST. Master thesis LITH-IDA-EX-05/022-SE, Linköpings universitet, Feb. 2005.

Further publications on OPTIMIST can be found on the OPTIMIST project homepage.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR RUNNING OPTIMIST

The OPTIMIST framework generates time-optimal code at the basic block level. To see the command-line options that you can pass to OPTIMIST, issue the following command (in your /home/agina/build/opt directory):

./rcc -target=opt -? <file.c>

where <file.c> is the source C file.

Usage of options:

	-archi=<XML file>	Specify target architecture file.
	-vcg	Generate DAGs in VCG format.
	-dot	Generate DAGs in dot format.
	-bb=<n>	Generate code for BB number n.
	-hs=<n>	Heuristic: at each z generate at most n variants.
	-ts=<n>	Heuristic: at each stage generates at most n transfers.
	-verb=[1,2,3,4]	Verbosity level.
	-?	Show this help.
	-emitter:mnemonic	Prints the mnemonics instead of FORMAT assembler
	-emitter:debug	Prints mnemonics next to the assembler
	-opt_c_debug	Shows calls to back-end events
	-arm_asm	Assembler directives and declarations for ARM
	-ilp	Generates ILP data
	-ddep	Remove DDEP and LINK edges (resulting code might be erronous)

Example:

To compile the second basic block of the source file foo.c for the arm9e architecture, issue the following command:

./rcc -target=opt -archi=arm9e.xml -bb=1 -arm_asm foo.c

LICENSE

The OPTIMIST framework includes the LCC compiler and hence the license for LCC applies accordingly.

CONTACT

Comments and suggestions are welcome!

Please send bug reports to Mattias Eriksson (mater @ ida.liu.se).

Christoph Kessler. Page last updated: 2011/06/29