IBM offers open source machine learning compiler

IBM is announcing on Tuesday availability of an open source machine learning compiler, which the company said intelligently optimizes applications, thus meaning shorter development times and bigger performance gains.

Called Milepost GCC, the compiler is the result of a collaboration between IBM and partners in the European Union-funded Milepost consortium. The project is an extension of the GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) effort.

[ Also in the development world, IBM recently pushed agile development as a better alternative to waterfall-style development. ]

IBM expects the compiler to dramatically reduce time-to-market for new software designs. Applications can be more quickly tuned for a targeted architecture. Initial IBM experiments on IBM System p servers had an average of an 18 percent performance improvement on embedded application benchmarks, IBM said.

"Our technology automatically learns how to get the best performance from the hardware -- whether mobile phones, desktops, or entire systems -- the software will run faster and use less energy," said Bilha Mendelson, manager of code optimization technologies at IBM Research. "We opened the compiler environment so it can access artificial intelligence and machine learning guidance to automatically determine exactly what specific optimizations should be used and when to apply them to ramp up performance."

The Milepost GCC compiler is available from the consortium Web site. Also, the consortium has launched a code-tuning Web site available to developers.

For more enterprise computing news, visit InfoWorld. Story copyright InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.