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Byfl documentation

Introductory material

• README file
• Installation instructions

Compiler wrapper scripts

These all contain pretty much the same information. Take your pick.

• bf-clang wraps the Clang C compiler.
• bf-clang++ wraps the Clang C++ compiler.
• bf-gcc wraps the GNU C compiler.
• bf-g++ wraps the GNU C++ compiler.
• bf-gfortran wraps the GNU Fortran compiler.
• bf-gccgo wraps the GNU Go compiler.

Output postprocessors

Byfl programs generate a binary .byfl file as output. The following programs convert .byfl files to various other formats:

• bfbin2xmlss converts a .byfl file to a formatted XML Spreadsheet spreadsheet that can be imported into LibreOffice Calc, Microsoft Excel 2003+, and Numbers for Mac.
• bfbin2csv outputs a .byfl file in comma-separated value format for ease of parsing
• bfbin2sqlite3 converts a .byfl file to a SQLite 3 database. SQLite 3 databases are standalone files that can be used as is or imported into a heavyweight database management system.
• bfbin2hdf5 recodes a .byfl file in HDF5 format, a format often used for scientific data.

All of the above are implemented using a callback-based API that Byfl provides. The API includes a single C function that parses a .byfl file and calls user-defined functions for each table, column header, and data value it encounters. You can use the API to write your own .byfl output postprocessors.

• bf_process_byfl_file

SWIG wrappers are installed if SWIG is available. These let you write .byfl postprocessors in a variety of scripting languages. The SWIG version of the Byfl API is not based on callbacks because SWIG doesn't currently support callback functions. The following example shows how to process a .byfl file from Python:

• bfbin2py installation instructions and Python script

Publications

Byfl is introduced in the following extended abstract:

• Scott Pakin and Patrick McCormick, "Hardware-independent application characterization". 2013 IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization (IISWC), Portland, Oregon, USA, 22-24 Sept. 2013, pp. 111-112. ISBN: 978-1-4799-0553-9, DOI: 10.1109/IISWC.2013.6704676.

A cache model built using the Byfl infrastructure is described in the following workshop paper:

• Eric Anger, Sudhakar Yalamanchili, Scott Pakin, and Patrick McCormick, "Architecture-Independent Modeling of Intra-Node Data Movement". 2014 LLVM Compiler Infrastructure in HPC (LLVM-HPC), New Orleans, Lousiana, USA, 17 Nov. 2014, pp. 29-39. ISBN: 978-1-4799-7023-0 DOI: 10.1109/LLVM-HPC.2014.6.