MLIR: Scaling Compiler Infrastructure for Domain Specific Computation

This work presents the MLIR compiler infrastructure, which is a novel approach to building reusable compiler infrastructure. MLIR aims to address software fragmentation, improve compilation for heterogeneous hardware, significantly reduces the cost of building domain specific compilers, and aid in connecting existing compilers together. MLIR facilitates the design and implementation of code generators, translators and optimizer at different levels of abstraction and also across application domains, hardware targets and execution environments. The scientific perspective on these challenges is twofold: 1) evaluating MLIR as an infrastructure that enables new research and educational approaches on programming languages, compilers, code generators, execution environments, hardware acceleration and codesign; and 2) discussing MLIR as a research artifact built for extension and evolution, raising its own design, semantics, algorithmic, system, engineering, and multi-disciplinary challenges. The paper presents the rationale for MLIR, its original design principles, structures and semantics, and validates these by surveying some applications of it.

• Machine Intelligence

• Software Systems