Trimaran 2.0 Evaluation
Ashok Sudarsanam, 13 Sep 1999

The Trimaran 2.0 compiler infrastructure, which was recently made publicly available,  is a joint effort between HP Labs, the University of Illinois, and New York University.  The front-end of Trimaran is IMPACT 2.33a, which was developed by the University of Illinois.  The back-end of Trimaran is called Elcor, and was developed by HP Labs.  NYU has developed a graphical user interface for the Trimaran package.  Trimaran 2.0 possesses the following advantages:
 

• Elcor back-end very usable, written in C++ (very SUIF-like)
• powerful suite of machine-independent code optimizations (from IMPACT)
• powerful suite of VLIW data structures and code optimization algorithms
• GUI extremely useful for experimentation, can be easily extended
• documentation fairly reasonable (much better than IMPACT)
• good support team
• we can leverage of Bob Rau's CAR Research Group at HP Labs

Trimaran possesses just a couple of disadvantages:
 

• Elcor currently supports PlayDoh, which is a parameterized non-clustered VLIW architecture.  Thus, Elcor may need to be modified substantially if we wish to target architectures that differ significantly from PlayDoh (e.g. clustered VLIW architectures)
• Only Linux and HP-UX ports are currently available -- this is not really  a disadvantage