A compiler is a computer program that transforms computer code written in one programming language into another programming language. Compilers are a type of translator that support digital devices, primarily computers. The name compiler is primarily used for programs that translate source code from a high-level programming language to a lower level language to create an executable program.
In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is an emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized hardware, software, or a combination.
In computer science, an interpreter is a computer program that directly executes, i.e. performs instructions written in a programming or scripting language, without requiring them previously to have been compiled into a machine language program. An interpreter generally uses one of the following strategies for program execution:
- parse the source code and perform its behavior directly;
- translate source code into some efficient intermediate representation and immediately execute this;
- explicitly execute stored precompiled code made by a compiler which is part of the interpreter system.
In computer engineering, a hardware description language (HDL) is a specialized computer language used to describe the structure and behavior of electronic circuits, and most commonly, digital logic circuits.
A computing platform or digital platform is the environment in which a piece of software is executed. It may be the hardware or the operating system (OS), even a web browser and associated application programming interfaces, or other underlying software, as long as the program code is executed with it. Computing platforms have different abstraction levels, including a computer architecture, an OS, or runtime libraries. A computing platform is the stage on which computer programs can run.
Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or the execution of processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. There are several different forms of parallel computing: bit-level, instruction-level, data, and task parallelism. Parallelism has long been employed in high-performance computing, but it's gaining broader interest due to the physical constraints preventing frequency scaling. As power consumption by computers has become a concern in recent years, parallel computing has become the dominant paradigm in computer architecture, mainly in the form of multi-core processors.
Hardware abstractions are sets of routines in software that emulate some platform-specific details, giving programs direct access to the hardware resources.
An Intermediate representation (IR) is the data structure or code used internally by a compiler or virtual machine to represent source code. An IR is designed to be conducive for further processing, such as optimization and translation. A "good" IR must be accurate – capable of representing the source code without loss of information – and independent of any particular source or target language. An IR may take one of several forms: an in-memory data structure, or a special tuple- or stack-based code readable by the program. In the latter case it is also called an intermediate language.
In computing, hardware acceleration is the use of computer hardware specially made to perform some functions more efficiently than is possible in software running on a general-purpose CPU. Any transformation of data or routine that can be computed, can be calculated purely in software running on a generic CPU, purely in custom-made hardware, or in some mix of both. An operation can be computed faster in application-specific hardware designed or programmed to compute the operation than specified in software and performed on a general-purpose computer processor. Each approach has advantages and disadvantages. The implementation of computing tasks in hardware to decrease latency and increase throughput is known as hardware acceleration.
A system architecture or systems architecture is the conceptual model that defines the structure, behavior, and more views of a system. An architecture description is a formal description and representation of a system, organized in a way that supports reasoning about the structures and behaviors of the system.
Portability in high-level computer programming is the usability of the same software in different environments. The prerequirement for portability is the generalized abstraction between the application logic and system interfaces. When software with the same functionality is produced for several computing platforms, portability is the key issue for development cost reduction.
This is a glossary of terms used in the field of Reconfigurable computing and reconfigurable computing systems, as opposed to the traditional Von Neumann architecture.
No instruction set computing (NISC) is a computing architecture and compiler technology for designing highly efficient custom processors and hardware accelerators by allowing a compiler to have low-level control of hardware resources.
Verilator is a free and open-source software tool which converts Verilog to a cycle-accurate behavioral model in C++ or SystemC. It is restricted to modeling the synthesizable subset of Verilog and the generated models are cycle-accurate, 2-state, with synthesis semantics. As a consequence the models typically offer higher performance than the more widely used event driven simulators, which can process the entire Verilog language and model behavior within the clock cycle. Verilator is now used within academic research, open source projects and for commercial semiconductor development. It is part of the growing body of free EDA software.
Glenford Myers is an American computer scientist, entrepreneur, and author. He founded two successful high-tech companies, authored eight textbooks in the computer sciences, and made important contributions in microprocessor architecture. He holds a number of patents, including the original patent on "register scoreboarding" in microprocessor chips. He has a BS in electrical engineering from Clarkson University, an MS in computer science from Syracuse University, and a PhD in computer science from the Polytechnic Institute of New York University.
M-Labs is a company and community who develop, manufacture and sell advanced open hardware devices and solutions. It is best known for the Milkymist system-on-chip (SoC) which is among the first commercialized system-on-chip designs with free HDL source code.
In the electronics industry, dark silicon is the amount of circuitry of an integrated circuit that cannot be powered-on at the nominal operating voltage for a given thermal design power (TDP) constraint. This is a challenge in the era of nanometer semiconductor nodes, where transistor scaling and voltage scaling are no longer in line with each other, resulting in the failure of Dennard scaling. This discontinuation of Dennard scaling has led to sharp increases in power densities that hamper powering-on all the transistors simultaneously at the nominal voltage, while keeping the chip temperature in the safe operating range. According to recent studies, researchers from different groups have projected that, at 8 nm technology nodes, the amount of Dark Silicon may reach up to 50–80% depending upon the processor architecture, cooling technology, and application workloads. Dark Silicon may be unavoidable even in server workloads with abundance of inherent client request-level parallelism.
The Xputer is a design for a reconfigurable computer, proposed by computer scientist Reiner Hartenstein. Hartenstein uses various terms to describe the various innovations in the design, including config-ware, flow-ware, morph-ware, and "anti-machine".
