tkonolige commented on a change in pull request #6097:
URL: https://github.com/apache/incubator-tvm/pull/6097#discussion_r458240967
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File path: docs/dev/index.rst
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@@ -15,28 +15,360 @@
specific language governing permissions and limitations
under the License.
-Design and Developer Guide
-==========================
+Design and Architecture
+=======================
+
+This document is intended for developers who want to understand the
+architecture of TVM and/or actively develop on the project.
+This page is organized as follows:
+
+- The `Example Compilation Flow`_ gives an overview of the steps that TVM
takes to turn a high level description of a model into a deployable module.
+ To get started, please read the this section first.
+- The `Logical Architecture Components`_ section describes the logical
components.
+ The sections after are specific guides focused on each logical component,
organized
+ by the component's name.
+- The `How Tos`_ section contains useful tutorials to solve specific
development problems.
+
+This guide provides a few complementary views of the architecture.
+First, we review a single end to end compilation flow and discuss the key data
structures and the transformations.
+This runtime-based view focuses on the interactions of each components when
running the compiler.
+Then we will review the logical modules of the codebase and their
relationship. This part provides a static overarching view of the design.
+
+
+Example Compilation Flow
+------------------------
+
+In this guide, we will study an example compilation flow in the compiler. The
figure below shows the flow. At a high-level, it contains several steps:
+
+- Import: The frontend component ingests a model into an IRModule, which
contains a collection of functions that internally represent the model.
+- Transformation: The compiler transforms an IRModule to another functionally
equivalent or approximately
+ equivalent(e.g. in the case of quantization) IRModule. Many of the
transformatons are target (backend) independent.
+ We also allow target to affect the configuration of the transformation
pipeline.
+- Target Translation: The compiler translates(codegen) the IRModule to an
executable format specified by the target.
+ The target translation result is encapsulated as a `runtime.Module` that can
be exported, loaded, and executed on the target runtime environment.
+- Runtime Execution: the user loads back a `runtime.Module` and runs the
compiled functions in the supported runtime environment.
+
+
+.. figure::
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tvmai/web-data/master/images/design/tvm_dyn_workflow.svg
+ :align: center
+ :width: 85%
+
+
+Key data structures
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+
+One of the best ways to design and understand a complex system is to identify
the key data structures and APIs that
+manipulate (transform) these data structures. Once we identified the key data
structures, we can then breakdown a system into logical
+components that either define a collection of key data structures or
transformations among the data structures.
+
+**IRModule** is the primary data structure used across the entire stack. An
IRModule (intermediate representation module)
+contains a collection of functions. Currently, we support two primary variants
of functions.
+
+- **relay::Function** is a high-level functional program representation. A
relay.Function usually corresponds to an end to end model.
+ You can view a relay.Function as a computational graph with additional
support for control-flow, recursion, and complex data structures.
+- **tir::PrimFunc** is a low-level program representation that contains
elements including loop-nest choices, multi-dimensional load/store,
+ threading, and vector/tensor instructions. It is usually used to represent
an operator program that executes a (possibly-fused) layer in a model.
+
+During the compilation, a relay function may be lowered to multiple
tir::PrimFunc functions and a top-level function that calls into
+those tir::PrimFunc functions.
+
+Transformations
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+
+Now that we have covered the key data structures, let us talk about the
transformations. Each transformation could serve one of the following purposes:
+
+- optimization: transform a program to an equivalent, possibly more optimized
version.
+- lowering: transform a program to a lower-level representation that is closer
to the target.
+
+**relay/transform** contains a collection of passes that optimize the model.
The optimizations include common program
+optimizations such as constant folding and dead-code elimination, and
tensor-computation specific passes such as layout
+transformation and scaling factor folding.
+
+Near the end of the relay optimization pipeline, we will run a pass(FuseOps)
to break the end to end function(e.g. mobilenet)
+into sub-function(e.g. conv2d-relu) segments. We call these segments of
functions.
+This process helps us to divide the original problem into two sub-problems:
+
+- Compilation and optimization for each sub-function.
+- Overall execution structure: we need to do a sequence of calls into the
generated sub-functions to execute the whole model.
+
+We use the low-level tir phase to compile and optimize each sub-functions. For
specific targets, we may also directly go to the target translation phase and
use external code generators.
+
+There are a few different ways(in relay/backend) to handle the calls into the
overall execution problem. For simple models with known shapes and no control
flow, we can lower to a graph runtime that stores the execution structure in a
graph. We also support a virtual machine backend for dynamic executions.
Finally, we plan to support ahead of time compilation that compiles the
high-level execution structure into the executable and generated primitive
functions. All of these execution modes are encapsulated by a unified
**runtime.Module** interface, which we will discuss in the latter part of the
guide.
+
+**tir/transform** contains transformation passes for TIR level functions. Many
tir passes serve the purpose of lowering. For example, there are passes to
flatten multi-dimensional access to one-dimensional pointer access, to expand
the intrinsics into target-specific ones, and to decorate the function entry to
meet the runtime calling convention. Of course, there are also optimizations
passes, such as access index simplification and dead code elimination.
+
+Many low-level optimizations can be handled in the target phase by the LLVM,
CUDA C, and other target compilers. As a result, we leave low-level
optimizations such as register allocation to the downstream compilers and only
focus on optimizations that are not covered by them.
+
+Search-space and Learning-based Transformations
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+
+The transformation passes we described so far are deterministic and
rule-based. One design goal of the TVM stack is to support high-performance
code optimizations for different hardware platforms. To do so, we will need to
investigate as many optimizations choices as possible, including but not
limited to, multi-dimensional tensor access, loop tiling behavior, special
accelerator memory hierarchy, and threading.
+
+It is hard to define a heuristic to make all of the choices. Instead, we will
take a search and learning-based approach.
+We first define a collection of actions we can take to transform a program.
Example actions include loop transformations, inlining,
+vectorization. We call these actions **scheduling primitives**. The collection
of scheduling primitives defines a search space of possible
+optimizations we can make to a program. The system will use then searches over
different possible scheduling
+sequence to pick the best scheduling combination.
+The search procedure is usually guided by a machine learning algorithm.
+
+We can record the best schedule sequence for an (possibly-fused) operator once
the search is completed. The compiler can then just lookup the best
+schedule sequence and apply it to the program. Notably, this schedule
application phase **exactly like** the rule-based transformations,
+enabling us to share the same interface convention with tradition passes.
+
+We use search based optimizations to handle the initial tir function
generation problem. This part of the module is called AutoTVM(auto_scheduler).
+We expect to expand the learning-based transformations to more areas as we
continue to develop the TVM stack.
+
+Target Translation
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+
+The target translation phase transforms an IRModule to the corresponding
target executable format.
+For backends such as x86 and ARM, we will use the LLVM IRBuilder to build
in-memory LLVM IR.
+We can also generate source-level languages such as CUDA C and OpenCL.
+Finally, we support the direct translation of a Relay function (sub-graph) for
external code generators.
+Importantly, the final code generation phase should be lightweight as possible
with the vast majority of transformations
+and lowering performed before target translation.
+We also provide a Target structure to specify the compilation target.
Review comment:
I think a little more detail here would be nice. Maybe give examples of
what the Target can be. Or what the Target structure allows a user to do?
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