C and OpenCL Generation from MATLAB

Abstract

In many engineering and science areas, models are developed and validated using high-level programing languages and environments as is the case with MATLAB. In order to target the multicore heterogeneous architectures being used on embedded systems to provide high performance computing with acceptable energy/power envelops, developers manually migrate critical code sections to lower-level languages such as C and OpenCL, a time consuming and error prone process. Thus, automatic source-to-source approaches are highly desirable. We present an approach to compile MATLAB and output equivalent C/OpenCL code to target architectures, such as GPU based hardware accelerators. We evaluate our approach on an existing MATLAB compiler framework named MATISSE. The OpenCL generation relies on the manual insertion of directives to guide the compilation and is also capable of generating C wrapper code to interface and synchronize with the OpenCL code. We evaluated the compiler with a number of benchmarks from different domains and the results are very encouraging.