FALCON: A MATLAB interactive restructuring compiler

Abstract

The development of efficient numerical programs and library routines for high-performance parallel computers is a complex task requiring not only an understanding of the algorithms to be implemented, but also detailed knowledge of the target machine and the software environment. In this paper, we describe a programming environment that can utilize such knowledge for the development of high-performance numerical programs and libraries. This environment uses an existing highlevel array language (MATLAB) as source language and performs static, dynamic, and interactive analysis to generate Fortran 90 programs with directives for parallelism. It includes capabilities for interactive and automatic transformations at both the operation-level and the functional- or algorithm-level. Preliminary experiments, comparing interpreted MATLAB programs with their compiled versions, show that compiled programs can perform up to 48 times faster on a serial machine, and up to 140 times faster on a vector machine.