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Lead Developers: Artem Shinkarov, TBD

Many applications that deal with whole numbers do not require the full range provided by the default integer type. While this may be negligible in cases where only a few such numbers are needed, when dealing with large arrays of them the situation is radically different. Using “oversise” data types does not only constitute a waste of memory space but it also increases the pressure on memory bandwidth and it limits the potential gains from vectorised operations.

The development of a compilation strategy for m-dimensional arrays of n-bit integers poses a major challenge when attempting to target a wide range of architectures with vector instructions including mainstream architectures such as X86 and Sparc as well as novel multicores such as the Cell Broadband Engine or Intel's Larrabee processor.

Current Status: Artem looked into this and ended up doing layout transformations for vectorisation. This work should build on Artem's vectorisation and introduce SIMD in a register support.