Performance Impact of Using ESP to Implement VMMC Firmware.

Sanjeev Kumar, Kai Li.

In the Proceedings of ACM Workshop on Novel Uses of System Area Networks (SAN), Boston, Massachusetts, January 2002.

Paper: pdf [0.16MB ], ps [0.54MB ]

ESP is a language for programmable devices. Unlike C which forces a tradeoff that requires giving up ease of programming and reliability to achieve high performance, ESP is designed to provide all of these three properties simultaneously.

This paper measures the performance impact on applications of using ESP to implement VMMC firmware. It compares the performance of an earlier implementation of VMMC firmware that used C with the new implementation that uses ESP. We find that SPLASH2 applications incur a modest performance hit (3.5 % on average) when using the ESP version.

This paper also describes the techniques used by the ESP compiler to optimize the programs. To achieve good performance, the C version required a number of optimizations to be performed manually by the programmer. In contrast, the ESP version was optimized entirely by the compiler.