Brief History of PIPS

PIPS has been developed at CRI since 1988, thru several research projects funded by the French DoD (DRET), the French NSF (CNRS & ANR) and the European Union (ESPRIT programs). The initial design was made by Rémi TRIOLET, François IRIGOIN and Pierre JOUVELOT. This initial design has proved good enough since then and has not required any major change. The overview paper presented at ICS'91 still is up-to-date at a coarse-grain level, although major functionalities have been added since.

The development of the PIPS compiler workbench by the PIPS team was performed in different projects:

• 1988-91: Initial PIPS project, funded by DRET to evaluate the potential of interprocedural parallelization for generic parallel shared-memory machines
• 1989-91: WP65, part of the PUMA project, funded by the ESPRIT Program (Project 2701); automatic compiler-generated emulation of a shared memory for distributed-memory machines, especially for INMOS T9000 and C104 based machines
• 1991-93: PIPS-2 project, funded by DRET to exploit generic techniques developped in project PIPS for Cray vector shared-memory multiprocessors
• 1992-: HPFC project, supported by ARCHIPEL and later by the Paradigme Project; the purpose is to develop techniques for compiling HPF Fortran
• 1994: Compilation Techniques for Distributed-Memory Machines, joint project with PRISM laboratory and CEA, funded by DRET
• 1996: compilation of signal processing specifications for distributed-memory machines, joint work with Thomson-CSF, funded by DRET
• 1999+: PIPS is going on with varioud funding at CRI, TÉLÉCOM Bretagne and other places.