Can we teach computers to write fast libraries?

Abstract

As the computing world "goes multicore", high performance library development finally becomes a nightmare. Optimal programs, and their underlying algorithms, have to be adapted to take full advantage of the platform's parallelism, memory hierarchy, and available instruction set. To make things worse, the best implementations are often platform-dependent and platforms are constantly evolving, which quickly renders libraries obsolete. As a consequence, developers are forced to permanently re-implement and re-optimize the same functionality and often even revert to assembly coding just as 50 years ago.