Compilation on the GPU?
Robin F. Voetter, Marcel Huijben, Kristian F. D. Rietveld · 2022
The emergence of highly parallel architectures has led to a renewed interest in parallel compilation. In particular, the widespread availability of GPU architectures raises the question whether compilation on the GPU is feasible. In this paper, we describe the first design and implementation of a parallel compiler from a simple imperative programming language to RISC-V machine code, that is fully executed on a GPU. To accomplish this, all stages from parsing to machine code generation were redesigned to exploit fine-grained parallelism. Experimental evaluation of the implemented prototype demonstrates our proposed parallel techniques to be effective and implementation of compilation on the GPU to be feasible. Finally, we propose a number of avenues for future work and hope to revitalize research into parallel compilation conducted in the 1980s.