Lightweight and Locality-Aware Composition of Black-Box Subroutines
Author(s)
Bansal, Manya
Sharlet, Dillon
Ragan-Kelley, Jonathan
Amarasinghe, Saman
Date Issued
June 13, 2025
Journal
Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
Publisher
ACM
Citation
Manya Bansal, Dillon Sharlet, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, and Saman Amarasinghe. 2025. Lightweight and Locality-Aware Composition of Black-Box Subroutines. Proc. ACM Program. Lang. 9, PLDI, Article 189 (June 2025), 25 pages.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Subroutines are essential building blocks in software design: users encapsulate common functionality in libraries and write applications by composing calls to subroutines. Unfortunately, performance may be lost at subroutine boundaries due to reduced locality and increased memory consumption. Operator fusion helps recover performance lost at composition boundaries. Previous solutions fuse operators by manually rewriting code into monolithic fused subroutines, or by relying on heavy-weight compilers to generate code that performs fusion. Both approaches require a semantic understanding of the entire computation, breaking the decoupling necessary for modularity and reusability of subroutines.
In this work, we attempt to identify the minimal ingredients required to fuse computations, enabling composition of subroutines without sacrificing performance or modularity. We find that, unlike previous approaches that require a semantic understanding of the computation, most opportunities for fusion require understanding only data production and consumption patterns. Exploiting this insight, we add fusion on top of black-box subroutines by proposing a lightweight enrichment of subroutine declarations to expose data-dependence patterns. We implement our approach in a system called Fern, and demonstrate Fern's benefits by showing that it is competitive with state-of-the-art, high-performance libraries with manually fused operators, can fuse across library and domain boundaries for unforeseen workloads, and can deliver speedups of up to $5\times$ over unfused code.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/3729292
