An Overview of the Open Research Compiler

The Open Research Compiler (ORC), jointly developed by Intel Microprocessor Technology Labs and the Institute of Computing Technology at Chinese Academy of Sciences, has become the leading open source compiler on the ItaniumTM Processor Family (IPF, previously known as IA-64). Since its first release in 2002, it has been widely used in academia and industry worldwide as a compiler and architecture research infrastructure and as code base for further development. In this paper, we present an overview of the design of the major components in ORC, especially those new features in the code generator. We discuss the development methodology that is important to achieving the objectives of ORC. Performance comparisons with other IPF compilers and a brief summary of the research work based on ORC are also presented.