Starting Monday 1st of May, we hosted a week long xDSL/MLIR hackathon that culminated in an MLIR workshop on 9th of May in Edinburgh. The idea of the hackathon was to bring together those who are using, an those who are interested in using, xDSL with xDSL developers to further enhance the ecosystem and support new, novel use-cases. There was strong involvement from the CONVOLVE project where a major focus was how to leverge xDSL and MLIR to enable efficient programming of the PULP snitch architecture, culminating in a new snitch and RISC-V dialect being added to xDSL.
We also spent time working on the core HPC dialects of xDSL, with enhancements made especially around the halo and MPI dialects in order to ensure that these provide good performance.
The hackathon culminated on Tuesday the 9th of May with an MLIR workshop organised by xDSL. We had a wide variety of speakers, from those involved in the xDSL project developing dialects and DSLs atop the technology, to those who are heavily leveraging MLIR and interested in the productivity enhancements provided by xDSL. The workshop culminated in round table discussions, where a series of topics were discussed in 30 minute sessions and the 40 or-so workshop participants selected the topic most relavent to them. These ranged from new vectorisation standards, to improved C frontends.
Overall the week was very tiring but a great success, special mentio should be given to Arjun Pitchanathan and Anton Lydike who undertook much of the organisation.