Exploring a collaboration with DaCe developers and researchers

Published: 14 March 2025

As part of implementing the roadmap, we are seeking various academic collaborations. For example, DaCe has recently caught our attention as a good candidate for the foundation of the future Adaptyst intermediate representation (IR).

This is thanks to the following:

• DaCe utilises stateful dataflow multigraphs (SDFGs) which are a compiler intermediate representation as well.
• The data-centrism, parallelism, and support for symbolic expressions in SDFGs allow performing high-performance-computing-related analyses and optimisations that are normally harder to achieve in traditional IRs.
• It is possible to integrate non-SDFG/control-centric code into SDFGs, e.g. by using the MLIR-to-SDFG conversion flow. Therefore, Adaptyst will still be able to scale from embedded to high-performance computing as planned.
• DaCe is an actively-maintained open-source project by several members, including Tal Ben-Nun from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Scalable Parallel Computing Lab at ETH Zurich.

We are happy to share that we have got in touch with Tal Ben-Nun, one of the main DaCe maintainers. We had a fruitful introductory discussion on 10 March about how SDFGs and Adaptyst can work together and how the DaCe teams and CERN can cooperate. We also agreed on the next steps to take for both sides to benefit the most from this collaboration.

At this point, we would like to express an immense gratitude to Prof. Aleksandar Ilic from INESC-ID (involved in the SYCLOPS project), who helped us establish the connection!