Goals

Didn’t write them 😔


Today (Tuesday), I’m waking up determined to explore what I can do about Glenside’s eval. So let’s go!

The first thing I think I want to look into is whether I can use it for layout something-or-other. Specifically, I think I should maybe start with representing a layout like NCHWc; a more out-there layout.

Maybe the question is can we do an entire workload in NCHWc? This isn’t the kind of thing that Glenside necessarily can figure out, though. The problem is we still need to generate kernels. That’s the hard part! We can’t do that.

Reading through some docs on the TVM Auto-scheduler: you define the compute, and it determines layouts and schedules. Very impressive, didn’t even know this existed!

For full disclosure, I’m just poking in the dark, here. It’s not quite that bad, I guess, but I have a hammer, and I’m looking for a nail.

A good question is, how do TVM and Glenside compare? They both represent kernels. TVM is a few languages; I think I’m specifically talking about the compute language and the schedule language. The compute language is perhaps the most similar to Glenside; in fact, how do we differ from the compute language? Is the compute language appropriate for an egraph? At the same time, we are also kind of like the schedule language. This is a problem of Glenside’s unspecific semantics, where it might just be specifying data dependencies but could also be interpreted as specifying the schedule.

What could we do? Start from the problem of knowing that some kernels need NCHWc. Is there anything we can do to optimize around that? Do layout transformations happen around NCHWc, that we could find a way to avoid? I mean, what’s there to do there? Basically, if you know what layout it goes in as and what layout it comes out as then you know what layouts to search for.

What’s the core issue? What’s blocking up my brain? It’s the fact that kernels are the hard thing to generate, and are the place (I think) where you have the most room for optimization. Data layout transformations between kernel invocations may not matter at all if the kernels themselves account for most of the runtime. Furthermore, what’s a mental blocker is that, even if you did find some optimal layout flow that minimized data layout transformations, it would probably use kernels that you don’t actually have. I think the root problem here is the idea that we’d be trying to “optimize” for something about the data layout flow, but I’m skeptical that our optimization metric would actually correspond to whole-program optimization. That is, we could use Glenside and the egraph to figure out a data layout flow that was “smaller”, for example, but in reality, that version of the program might be a lot slower. While we might have optimized the data layouts by some invented metric, it’s likely that we will have made the kernels themselves worse, and the kernels are where most of the runtime is spent. There’s a reason TVM is built to optimize kernels. It’s still the case, no matter how much I want it to be different, that workloads are sequences of kernels, and that optimizing those kernels is where much of the optimization problem lies.

It’s worth remembering that I can still present Glenside as a language for hardware–software codesign. It’s alright that there were more complexities which cropped up; we can be honest about that. At the very least, the im2col example is worthy of writing up. We can also talk about it as a language for hardware–compiler codesign.


I’m working again on my old Glenside experiment which completely rewrites the language. I think I need to focus my energy here because it’s clearly the thing I care about.

I’m trying to remember where I left off. The whole idea here is that we want to identify the same program structures between different workloads so that by inserting a new, similar workload into an egraph already containing a compiled workload, we get compilation of the newly inserted workload “for free”. That is, the structures in the new workload that are the same as the structures in the old workload are actually equivalent in the egraph, and so just inserting the new workload is equivalent to compiling it. This is daunting for a number of reasons. One of the main problems I’ve run into is this:


Glenside might actually be a useful example of the idea that you can build compilers automatically for hardware by starting with designing a hardware/software DSL. Sorry, that’s not super clear. My idea for the LATTE paper is that specialized hardware design does not take advantage of the fact that it is so specialized; to take full advantage, it should start with descriptions of the workloads that it cares about. I think we’re headed towards proposing that there should be centralized tools for this kind of design, instead of everyone rolling their own tools. Glenside is not one of those new tools I’m talking about, at least not yet, nor is it trying to be. It is still an ad-hoc, design-specific solution. So it doesn’t capture the entire LATTE vision. But it is an instantiation of the idea that you can start your process of hardware design from the workload, and not from just writing Verilog. You can write a DSL which goes into a Verilog generator.


Thursday pomodoros: XXXXX


I had a spat of existential, compare-yourself-to-others panic, today. I really feel bad about not having published yet. Really easy to fall into that hole.

Part of it, also, is that I am ready to publish; I’ve done a bunch of work on Glenside, and I know I can write something or other. I’ve already written nearly ten pages for an arxiv paper. I’m not dragging on it—I work on it every day—but it is still missing core parts (i.e. any eval!) so that causes me stress.


I had to dig up some old datatypes stuff for the 3LA collaboration that Steven leads. I was trying to figure out why we had put a pause on running Thierry’s AdaptivFloat through TVM. Here’s what I found, digging through my notes: we can handle datatypes implemented in Python, but it requires a bit of a hack on TVM’s PackedFuncs, to allow them to return more than just int32s, and we must run in single-threaded mode (I think due to weird interactions with the Python interpreter). The easier way would be to implement AdaptivFloat in any language that can be compiled to a library. Thierry had talked about doing this, but it’s unclear whether he actually wants to.

Update: Thierry says that we can emulate AdaptivFloat with the SoftFloat library. So that’s great!


This week was a productive one, like any other, yet I’m really hitting a patch of imposter syndrome. Not getting something together for LATTE is certainly not helping; I wrote a lot, but nothing crystallized. Without the Arxiv paper done, I think the lack of having published is just coming back up.

The truth is, I feel I can publish. At the very least, I can get the Glenside Arxiv done soon. What soon means is hard to say, because wheels are spinning with lack of concrete story, but I’m still making real progress on the technical details daily. Beyond that, I think we could grind out more papers if we want them; we can do something on the RTML work. It’s not that I’m convinced I’m not working. Were I in a vacuum, I wouldn’t feel this way. The real problem I’m having right now is with upward comparison: that tendency to compare ourselves to others.

I told myself I was going to do my best to avoid upward comparison in my PhD, and I’ve mostly been good about it. I told myself I was going to work hard, on things I care about, and write things I’m proud of; if I can’t do that, I’ll quit, or they’ll kick me out, and I can go get a tech job. I’m here only because I want to be. I think it’s been working well so far, but it’s weeks like these when I look back and ask, why haven’t I published, when many of my peers have? Have I been lazy? Have I lost my drive? No. I’m proud of what I’ve done. I got to my quals and did them; I didn’t write them up, and maybe feel a bit of guilt over that, but it was worth it to jump right into Glenside. I worked hard on Glenside, maybe harder and longer than I’ve worked on any technical project, and am now working to write it up now that it’s at a point of done-ness. I think bringing the Glenside paper into being will make me feel a little better. Perhaps that needs to be my main focus.

Yet I also can’t help but think that the most important thing I need to focus on is not getting caught up in upward comparison.