These were legacy concepts that are now superceded by direct Torch to
linalg-on-tensors lowering. These were based on some very early thinking
related to the layering of frontends vs codegen, which is now obsolete
because:
- We expected a lot more centralization at the frontend (TCF) level. It
turns out that frontend needs really vary a lot, and there is no grand
unifying TCF dialect plausible. The additional layer isn't worth it.
- Linalg-on-tensors obsoletes the primary need for TCP. There are still
a few things not representable with linalg-on-tensors, but the support
is growing and the whole "not included in linalg-on-tensors" direction
needs to be rethought. Our TCP dialect didn't cover any of the
actually important things in this space (such as sort, FFT, top-k,
etc.).
See historical [slides](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iljcpTQ5NPaMfGpoPDFml1XkYxjK_6A4/view) / [recording](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jSPa8TwPKUt0WuLquGc8OgSUVYJHMvWZ/view)
for more details on the origin story here.
Their presence was confusing users too
[bug](https://github.com/llvm/mlir-npcomp/issues/248).
Also,
- Trim down npcomp-run-mlir testing. It was testing TCF to TCP
lowering for the most part. The essential stuff is retained and
rephrased with linalg-on-tensors. (we should probably rename it
"refback-run" or something, as it is just a way to invoke RefBackend)
- test/Python/Backend/RefJIT/simple_invoke_numpy.py is XFAIL'ed. Our
"anti-framework" direction seems to be the likely future path.
* Adds f32 scalar argument support across the ABI boundary.
* Adds support for passing input type / shape information
across the ABI boundary
* Adds support for parsing / creating input FloatAttr's in
`npcomp-run-mlir`
Now the reference backend is cleanly accepts "TCP"+scalar ops.
We introduce tcf-refback-lowering-pipeline which also does TCF->TCP
conversion for convenience until we have a "target interface".
* Need to have a dag of shared library deps in order to interop across python extensions (as presented in ODM).
* Introduced add_npcomp_library and friends to mirror the MLIR setup.
* Adds a libNPCOMP.so shared library.
* Redirects tools and extensions to link against libNPCOMP.so (instead of static libs).
* Moves all libraries to lib/, all binaries to bin/ and all python extensions to python/. The invariant is that the rpaths are setup to have a one level directory structure.
* Reworks the _torch_mlir extension to build like the others (still need to come up with a consolidated rule to do this instead of open coded).
* Includes an upstream version bump to pick up needed changes.
Sizes with dynamic linking (stripped, release, asserts enabled):
libNPCOMP.so: 43M (includes much of the underlying LLVM codegen deps)
libMLIR.so: 31M
_npcomp.so: 1.6M (python extension)
_torch_mlir.so: 670K (python extension)
npcomp-capi-ir-test: 6.3K
npcomp-opt: 351K
npcomp-run-mlir: 461K
mnist-playground: 530K
Still more can be done to normalize and optimize but this gets us structurally to the starting point.
Other than the dialect definitions (which will live in standard Dialect/
subdirectory), the goal here is to keep RefBackend-related code nested
in {include/npcomp,lib,test}/RefBackend.
Sean Silva
Bryce Arden
Bairen Yi
Stella Laurenzo