Inside Microsoft's Four New AI Compilers for Accelerating Foundation Models
Parallelism, computation, memory, hardware acceleration and control flow are some of the capabilities addressed by the new compilers.
Compilers are seeing a renaissance in the era of generative AI. In the context of AI, a compiler is responsible for translating a neural network architecture into executable code in a specific hardware topology. Those two areas: model and hardware architectures, have been an explosion in innovation, regularly making AI compilers obsolete.
The challenges in AI compilation are many, from hardware acceleration to computation and memory efficiency. Microsoft Research has been at the forefront of the AI compiler research, and recently, they unveiled a quartet of cutting-edge AI compilers, each tailored to address specific challenges in the realm of deep neural networks (DNNs). The list includes the following compilers:
· Rammer: For parallelism
· Roller: For computation
· Welder: For memory
· Grinder: For control flow and hardware acceleration
Let’s dive into each one.