Verifying and Improving Halide’s Term Rewriting System with Program Synthesis
Halide is a domain-specific language for high-performance image processing and tensor computations, widely adopted in industry. Internally, the Halide compiler relies on a term rewriting system to prove properties of code required for efficient and correct compilation. This rewrite system is a collection of handwritten transformation rules that incrementally rewrite expressions into simpler forms; the system requires high performance in both time and memory usage to keep compile times low. In this work, we apply formal techniques to prove the correctness of existing rewrite rules and provide a guarantee of termination. Then, we build an automatic program synthesis system that operates over the undecidable theory of integers in order to craft new, provably correct rules from failure cases where the compiler was unable to prove properties. We identify and fix 5 incorrect rules as well as 8 rules which could give rise to infinite rewriting loops. We demonstrate that the synthesizer can produce better rules than hand-authored ones in five bug fixes, and describe four cases in which it has served as an assistant to a human compiler engineer. We further show that it can proactively improve weaknesses in the compiler by synthesizing a large number of rules without human supervision and showing that the enhanced ruleset lowers peak memory usage of compiled code without appreciably increasing compilation times.
Wed 20 OctDisplayed time zone: Central Time (US & Canada) change
15:40 - 17:00 | OOPSLA 2020 Papers 3SIGPLAN Papers at Zurich G Chair(s): Anders Miltner The University of Texas at Austin, Texas, USA | ||
15:40 15mTalk | DynamiTe: Dynamic Termination and Non-termination Proofs SIGPLAN Papers Ton Chanh Le Stevens Institute of Technology, Timos Antonopoulos Yale University, Parisa Fathololumi Stevens Institute of Technology, Eric Koskinen Stevens Institute of Technology, ThanhVu Nguyen George Mason University | ||
15:55 15mTalk | TacTok: Semantics-Aware Proof Synthesis SIGPLAN Papers Emily First University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Yuriy Brun University of Massachusetts Amherst, Arjun Guha Northeastern University Link to publication DOI Pre-print | ||
16:10 15mTalk | Towards A Unified Proof Framework for Automated Fixpoint Reasoning Using Matching Logic SIGPLAN Papers Xiaohong Chen University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Minh-Thai Trinh Advanced Digital Sciences Center, Nishant Rodrigues University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Lucas Peña University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Grigore Roşu University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | ||
16:25 15mTalk | Verifying and Improving Halide’s Term Rewriting System with Program Synthesis SIGPLAN Papers Julie L. Newcomb University of Washington, Andrew Adams Adobe, Steven Johnson Google, Rastislav Bodík University of Washington, Shoaib Kamil Adobe Research | ||
16:40 20mLive Q&A | Discussion, Questions and Answers SIGPLAN Papers |