HAIFA, ISRAEL: IBM today announced the public availability of Milepost GCC, the world's first open source machine learning compiler. The compiler intelligently optimizes applications, translating directly into shorter software development times and bigger performance gains.

Initial IBM experiments conducted on IBM System p servers achieved an average 18 percent performance improvement on embedded-application benchmarks.

In many organizations, software developers are fast becoming the nucleus of innovation, crucial to all business processes. They build the services and capabilities that will underlie future revenue and generate business opportunity. In fact, developers drive so much business value that the average enterprise devotes 30 to 50 percent of its entire technology infrastructure to the development and testing of software.

The new compiler, a result of collaboration between IBM and its partners in the European Union-funded Milepost consortium, is expected to dramatically reduce time-to-market for new software designs.

Applications can now be more quickly tuned for the targeted architecture, shortening the development cycle. For example, when a company wants to develop a new mobile phone, it normally takes application developers many months to get their software running at an acceptable level of performance. Milepost GCC can reduce the amount of time it takes to reach that level by a factor of 10, added the press release.

"Our technology automatically learns how to get the best performance from the hardware, whether mobile phones, desktops, or entire systems, the software will run faster and use less energy," noted Dr. Bilha Mendelson, manager of Code Optimization Technologies at IBM Research - Haifa.

Mendelson added, "We opened the compiler environment so it can access artificial intelligence and machine learning guidance to automatically determine exactly what specific optimizations should be used and when to apply them to ramp-up performance."