These were legacy concepts that are now superceded by direct Torch to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.
* Added additional *ToLLVM conversion patterns (they were disaggregated from standard).
* Misc renames.
* Spelling change on ConvNCHW op, and it now expects strides and dilations attributes.
- renames of OwningRewritePatternList -> RewritePatternSet
- also `insert` to `add`
- RewritePatternSet holds a context now
- memref dialect split from std
Date: Mon Nov 30 15:20:30 2020 -0800
Changes:
- finalizing-bufferize is stricter now, and we need to pull in a DimOp
bufferization which was previously working by happenstance. The
offending DimOp's are actually created by the linalg bufferization
(which creates dim ops on the original tensor values, not the
converted memrefs), so the fix is moving std-bufferize after
linalg-bufferize.
It was annoying that we were creating shape.get_extent in the middle of
the bufferization pipeline, as it required running convert-shape-to-std
at an awkward place. To make that cleaner, just open-code the
extract_element ops that shape.get_extent expands into.
This is a little gross, but it helps with the macroscopic pipeline
ordering issues. Anyway, the train is long-gone of trying to treat
shapes as some special data type that should only be operated on with
shape ops.
Also,
- reorder tensor constant bufferize (which is a module pass) to bracket
all the bufferization function passes, to make the parallelism
opportunities there clearer. Now we have a very clean little
bufferization segment of our pipeline construction.
This vastly simplifies our code, allowing deleting multiple ops,
simplifying multiple passes, and removing a whole pass.
Now `refback` dialect is down to one op (refback.alloc_memref, which
simplifies allocations to just take a shape instead of individual
extents).
* A bit gross because I took the chance to upgrade all of the backend bits to the new MLIR Python bindings and we still co-mingle the old and new for now.
* Since the Python created PassManagers are configured for explicit nesting, I had to upgrade some of the pass pipelines to be explicit.
* The demo in mul_maximum_e2e.py now compiles, runs through PyTorch and through the JIT, prints and asserts the same results.
* I am not claiming that this is the prettiest API in this patch: consider that this is just directly using low-level APIs and there should be an intervening high level API.
This involved adding a `tcp.splatted` op to splat a dynamically sized
init tensor. See rationale in TCPOps.td docs.
One interesting observation is that when lowering tcf.matmul to
linalg.matmul, we need to both 1) create the error checks and 2)
calculate a shape transfer function to create the init tensors.
Previously, 2) was deferred to bufferizing tcp.matmul later. I'm not
sure if this is a conflation of concerns or not. For now, it's not a big
burden.
Now, the only bufferization we have left is lowering tensor constants to
memref, which will hopefully proceed soon after Rahul's new
std.global_memref lands + the lowering to LLVM IR. Then I'll port
LowerConstantTensorsToMemref to upstream and we'll be 100% upstream
bufferization, except for our local TCP dialect (which will probably go
away and be replaced by std elementwise + linalg named ops on tensors :)
).
The time has come for BypassShapes/LowerShapedResultsToMemref to go away :(
For the reference backend, being consistent with upstream conventions is
the name of the game now.
This is a step down in a number of ways, e.g. test clarity and
separation of concerns. But it is fewer files and fewer tests, and
*does* address the "TODO: This is really fragile". It also eliminates two
more ops from the refback dialect (sadly, they are the
shaped_results/yield that we were getting kind of fond of, but alas).
Now that it has grown source/target materialization capabilities
(spelled with ops tensor_load/tensor_to_memref), we can use it. We can
also now delete refback.memref_to_tensor/refback.tensor_to_memref.
This is also a first step to reducing the downstream functionality
needed in the refback dialect.
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".
I now realize that VerboseCamelCase is not the best choice for dialect
directory/file names and C++ identifiers (take e.g. "Linalg", "Basicpy",
etc. as prior art here; not LinearAlgebra or BasicPython). If I had to
name the convention it seems to be "Shortword" (or of course just
acronym dialects like LLVM, SCF, etc.).
This rename also has the side benefit of differentiating RefBackend
directories, which now refer to the actual backend itself, from
Refback/Refbackrt, which are the dialects which happen to be used by
that backend.
Sean Silva
Stella Laurenzo
Aaron Arthurs