Mercurium C/C++/Fortran source-to-source compiler

Mercurium is a C/C++/Fortran source-to-source compilation infrastructure aimed at fast prototyping developed by the Programming Models group at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.

Mercurium is mainly used together with the Nanos++ Runtime Library to implement the OmpSs programming model. Both tools also implement OpenMP 3.1. Apart from that, since Mercurium is quite extensible it has been used to implement other programming models or compiler transformations, examples include Cell Superscalar, Software Transactional Memory, Distributed Shared Memory or the ACOTES project, just to name a few.

Extending Mercurium is achieved using a plugin architecture, where plugins represent several phases of the compiler. These plugins are written in C++ and dynamically loaded by the compiler according to the chosen profile configuration. Code transformations can be implemented in terms of source code (there is no need to modify or know the internal syntactic representation of the compiler).

Installation

1. Make sure you fulfill the build requirements

2. Download Mercurium's code

   1. From our repo

      • Clone Mercurium's repository

        • From GitHub:

            $ git clone https://github.com/bsc-pm/mcxx.git
          

        • From our internal GitLab repository (BSC users only):

            $ git clone https://pm.bsc.es/gitlab/mercurium/mcxx.git
          

      • Run autoreconf in the newly created mcxx directory

          $ cd mcxx
          $ autoreconf -fiv
          <<<autoreconf output>>>
        

   2. From a distributed tarball

      • Go to OmpSs downloads and grab the latest version of the compiler. Unpack the file and enter in the directory

          $ tar xvzf mcxx-<<version>>.tar.gz
          $ cd mcxx-<<version>>
        

3. Run configure. Check the configure flags to enable more or less features in the compiler. By default the compiler does not have anything enabled. Set the environment variable MERCURIUM to the directory where you want to install Mercurium

    $ export MERCURIUM=/path/to/install/mercurium
    $ ./configure --prefix=$MERCURIUM <<configure-flags>>
   

4. Build and install

    $ make
    <<<compilation output>>>
    $ make install
   

5. Add the installed binaries to your PATH

    $ export PATH=$MERCURIUM:$PATH
   

And that's all!

Mercurium profiles

Depending on the configure flags used to configure Mercurium, you may have some Mercurium profiles or others. A Mercurium profile is basically a binary with a predefined configuration that specifies the behavior of Mercurium. For example, a profile specifies which phases of Mercurium have to be executed or which backend compiler will be used.

Any installation of Mercurium has, at least, the plain profiles (plaincc, plaincxx and plainfc for C, C++ and Fortran languages respectively). These profiles do not transform any OpenMP/OmpSs pragma, they basically process your code and generate it again. They may seem useless, but they are really useful when debugging our compiler frontend.

For more information check our list of Mercurium's profiles.

Contact Information

For questions, suggestions and bug reports, you can contact us through the [email protected]