27 February 2017

NEWS: Google selected Polly Labs as mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2017! You are an undergraduate student or doing your doctorate? Join us to work on polyhedral compilation this summer! Here the link directly to our Polly Labs GSoC Ideas and Information Page.

Google Summer of Code


Polyhedral compilation is so much more than just the LLVM Polly project and with Polly Labs as a Google Summer of Code organization we now have a new tool that allows us to host Summer of Code students to work on polyhedral modeling projects that go even beyond the scope of LLVM and gcc. LLVM and gcc have been and are in the future great places to host core compiler projects that use polyhedral compilation, but our community is interested in a lot more. Work on the PPCG polyhedral GPU code generator, the isl math library, as well the PRL run-time library, but also many other research projects (Apollo, Polly-JIT, …) benefits the greater polyhedral community, but is certainly outside of the scope of our traditional host organizations. The Polly Labs GSoC effort provides a home for such kind of projects and complements the traditional GSoC work we do in the context of gcc, LLVM, or Julia.

Google Summer of Code has a long history in supporting polyhedral compilation. Polly itself started as a GSoC project and already Polly’s older sibling, GCC/Graphite, took part in the very first GSoC years, with Tobias Grosser (today Polly Labs and ETH Zurich) being the first student in 2008 (mentored by Sebastian Pop). Only one year later, Hongbin Zheng (today lead of Xilinx High-Level Synthesis Team) worked as GSoC student on the first implementation of the Polly frontend and put together with Tobias Grosser the first end-to-end version of Polly. Over the years, many GSoC students contributed directly or indirectly to advances in polyhedral compilation or infrastructure we build on today. LLVM’s original PTX backend was developed as part of Google Summer of Code 2011 by Justin Holewinski (today NVIDIA), and today drives the GPU generation of Polly-ACC, for which again foundations were laid during GSoC 2012 and 2014 by Yabin Hu. Over the years, many students worked on Google Summer of Code projects and contributed significant pieces to polyhedral compilation in general and Polly specifically and we hope that you might be the next one. Riyadh Baghdadi (now MIT, before ENS Paris), another former GSoC student working on GCC/graphite, wrote down some great advices on “how to write a great GSoC proposal”. Check them out to follow in the footsteps of many successful GSoC students.

We already have an interesting set of polyhedral experts, who kindly agreed to be mentors in projects of their expertise and we are hopeful to convince more. As a student, we invite you to apply with your own project ideas or to expand one of the ideas we suggested on our Google Summer of Code page. This pages also contains information about possible mentors, how to apply as a student, and generally how to get started with the Google Summer of Code process. We are looking forward to work with you on exciting Google Summer of Code projects!

[GSoC Logo source: https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/resources/media]