“DAISY, the open-source software for binary translation
research, is being released by IBM’s Watson Research Center.
DAISY’s dynamic compilation and 16-wide VLIW put the project at the
forefront of compiler techniques and architectural features. Maya
Stodte takes a closer look at DAISY and its core development
team.”
“Emulation projects like DAISY are born when binary translation
and just-in-time compilers meet together with a set of core
architectural features. Although Transmeta uses a similar approach,
their proprietary product only runs on a much narrower underlying
machine. (And it’s not open source anyway!) With user-transparency,
64 general purpose registers, and program parallelism, DAISY can
make translation to VLIW and EPIC a piece of cake. Well,
almost.”
“The Dynamically Architected Instruction Set from Yorktown
(DAISY) translates the binary code of a source architecture to the
binary code of a VLIW or EPIC machine by emulating the existing
architecture (such as PowerPC) on an underlying processor, which is
hidden from the user. As a just-in-time compiler, DAISY looks at
the code at run-time and picks out which operations to run in
parallel with the target architecture. Because this process is
transparent to the user, the user sees only the source architecture
instruction set. Fragments of the source architecture code are
translated, scheduled, and optimized just-in-time for the target
architecture to operate.”