Software acceleration of floating-point multiplication using runtime code generation — Student paper

Floating-point units are seldom in highly constrained systems, due to silicon and energy footprint, but emulated instead in algorithms based on integer arithmetic. In this paper, we use runtime code generation to generate outperforming flexible and optimized floating-point routines. On a Texas Instrument MSP430 fitted with only 512 bytes of RAM, we achieved mean speedups of 1032% and 52%, with tuning features enabling peaks up to 2012% and 64%, respectively for floating-point multiplication and an applicative case. At the best of our knowledge, runtime code generation was never achieved with such few computing and memory resources.