Building a “heavy metal quartet” of AI compilers
By MSR Editor
Compilation is an important process in program development, in which a program called a compiler translates source code written in a programming language into machine code executable on computer hardware. As AI technology and large-scale AI models become increasingly prevalent across the digital world, their unique characteristics are posing new challenges for compilers.
As AI models have evolved from early versions like recurrent neural networks (RNN) and convolutional neural networks (CNN) to more recent iterations like Transformer, their fundamental architecture is also constantly evolving. Meanwhile, the underlying hardware accelerators, such as graphics processing units (GPUs) and neural processing units (NPUs), are iterating rapidly as well, with some designs disrupting previous architectures. Therefore, an AI compiler plays a critical role in helping new AI