ACT Ecosystem

Recent years have seen a proliferation of specialized ML accelerators – proposed in both academia (e.g., Gemmini, FEATHER) and industry (e.g., Google TPU, Intel AMX) – that depart significantly from traditional CPU/GPU architectures. However, research on compiler and systems support for these accelerators remains sparse, largely due to the lack of mature open-source compiler infrastructures capable of targeting them from popular ML frameworks like PyTorch, and JAX. Building such support involves considerable manual effort, slowing innovation and creating a gap between hardware and software research communities.

To bridge this gap, we present ACT (Accelerator Compiler Toolkit) Ecosystem, an ecosystem that automatically generates complete compiler backends and essential software tooling from high-level ISA specifications of tensor accelerators.

The ACT ecosystem consists of:

TAIDL (Tensor Accelerator ISA Definition Language): A Python-based DSL for specifying tensor accelerator ISAs. TAIDL leverages tensor IRs like XLA-HLO to compactly and precisely model execution semantics of tensor accelerator ISAs.
TAIDL-TO (Test Oracle) Generator: Automatically generates scalable functional simulators just from TAIDL specifications, enabling correctness testing of the software stack. TAIDL-TOs are orders of magnitude faster than existing simulators.
ACT Backend Generator: Automatically generates sound and complete compiler backends just from TAIDL specification. ACT backends match or outperform state-of-the-art expert-written libraries, while maintaining low compile times (<1 sec).
XLA Integration: Enables end-to-end compilation from popular ML frameworks like JAX, TensorFlow, and PyTorch

We will present hands-on tutorials at ICFP/SPLASH 2025 (Singapore, Oct 12) and MICRO 2025 (Seoul, Oct 19) to demonstrate the capabilities of the ACT ecosystem. The tutorials are designed for researchers, practitioners, and students interested in compiler design, programming languages, and AI/ML hardware. By the end, participants will have hands-on experience with the complete ACT workflow and understand how to rapidly prototype compiler support for novel accelerator architectures.

News

Oct 19, 2025	[Today!] Berkeley Suite at MICRO 2025 - see you there! We are conducting a hands-on tutorial on the ACT Ecosystem at MICRO 2025 in Seoul, South Korea.
Oct 12, 2025	We organized a hands-on tutorial on the ACT Ecosystem at ICFP/SPLASH 2025 in Singapore.
Jul 14, 2025	Our paper titled TAIDL: Tensor Accelerator ISA Definition Language with Auto-generation of Scalable Test Oracles has been accepted at MICRO 2025!

Selected Publications

arXiv

ACT: Automatically Generating Compiler Backends from Tensor Accelerator ISA Descriptions

Devansh Jain, Akash Pardeshi, Marco Frigo, Krut Patel, Kaustubh Khulbe, Jai Arora, and Charith Mendis

Oct 2025

DOI Bib PDF

@misc{act-arxiv,
  title = {ACT: Automatically Generating Compiler Backends from Tensor Accelerator ISA Descriptions},
  author = {Jain, Devansh and Pardeshi, Akash and Frigo, Marco and Patel, Krut and Khulbe, Kaustubh and Arora, Jai and Mendis, Charith},
  year = {2025},
  eprint = {2510.09932},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {cs.PL},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09932},
  doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2510.09932},
  month = oct
}

MICRO

TAIDL: Tensor Accelerator ISA Definition Language with Auto-generation of Scalable Test Oracles

Devansh Jain, Marco Frigo, Jai Arora, Akash Pardeshi, Zhihao Wang, Krut Patel, and Charith Mendis

In 58th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO 2025)

Oct 2025

DOI Bib PDF

@inproceedings{taidl-micro2025,
  author = {Jain, Devansh and Frigo, Marco and Arora, Jai and Pardeshi, Akash and Wang, Zhihao and Patel, Krut and Mendis, Charith},
  title = {TAIDL: Tensor Accelerator ISA Definition Language with Auto-generation of Scalable Test Oracles},
  year = {2025},
  isbn = {9798400715730},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3725843.3756075},
  doi = {10.1145/3725843.3756075},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2025 58th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture},
  pages = {1316–1333},
  numpages = {18},
  series = {MICRO '25},
  month = oct
}

POPL

TensorRight: Automated Verification of Tensor Graph Rewrites

Jai Arora, Sirui Lu, Devansh Jain, Tianfan Xu, Farzin Houshmand, Phitchaya Mangpo Phothilimthana, Mohsen Lesani, Praveen Narayanan, Karthik Srinivasa Murthy, Rastislav Bodik, Amit Sabne, and Charith Mendis

In 52nd ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages

Jan 2025

Distinguished Paper Award

DOI Bib PDF

Distinguished Paper Award

@article{tensorright-popl2025,
  author = {Arora, Jai and Lu, Sirui and Jain, Devansh and Xu, Tianfan and Houshmand, Farzin and Phothilimthana, Phitchaya Mangpo and Lesani, Mohsen and Narayanan, Praveen and Murthy, Karthik Srinivasa and Bodik, Rastislav and Sabne, Amit and Mendis, Charith},
  title = {TensorRight: Automated Verification of Tensor Graph Rewrites},
  year = {2025},
  issue_date = {January 2025},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  volume = {9},
  number = {POPL},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3704865},
  doi = {10.1145/3704865},
  journal = {Proc. ACM Program. Lang.},
  month = jan,
  articleno = {29},
  numpages = {32},
  keywords = {Denotational Semantics, Tensor Compilers, Unbounded Verification}
}