This thesis is part of a large, multi-laboratory project to develop a GPU system-on-chip (SoC) for embedded systems. In support of this project, this current thesis presents the assembler and linker for the overall system. These tools were developed ¡§from scratch¡¨ for this project, because the both the input (to our assembler) and the output (from our linker) have new formats, due to the novelty of our GPU. One of the challenges of the work in this thesis is the problem of memory management. Another is the problem of deciding upon an assembly format. But the largest challenge was in co-design. The assembler has to work with a compiler which is also under development by other students. Also, the machine instructions that we produce have to support the format and functionality of the GPU hardware. To accomplish this, the specific details of this hardware had to be rigorously defined through discussion and negotiation. Furthermore, the memory addresses also required codesign with the benchmark development team, which needs to have access to these memory locations. So codesign issues impacted many of the features of this thesis.

This thesis describes the development of a compiler for OpenGLES 2.0 programs for a novel GPU. This work is a part of a larger project to develop a low-power GPU for embedded systems. Our compiler has been developed in the LLVM compiler infrastructure. The present thesis focuses on three areas of the compiler: 1) making corrections and improvements to an existing graphics shading language parser, 2) augmenting LLVM¡¦s bit-code format to support the new information from the shading language, and 3) modifying LLVM¡¦s backend to support this augmented bit-code. Much of this work is related to supporting the matrix and vector primitive data types found in OpenGL¡¦s GLSL shading language. In conjunction with several other theses, as listed in the text, this work achieves a working basic compiler for GLSL code on our new GPU. Continuing work by future researchers is necessary to make the compiler more robust and optimized.

Since the introduction of programmable Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and procedural shaders, hardware vendors have each developed their own individual real-time shading language standard. None of these shading languages is fully platform independent. Although this real-time programmable shader technology could be developed into 3D application on a single system, this platform dependent limitation keeps the shader technology away from 3D Internet applications. The primary purpose of this dissertation is to design a framework for translating different shader formats to platform independent shaders and embed them into the eXtensible 3D (X3D) scene for 3D web applications. This framework includes a back-end core shader converter, which translates shaders among different shading languages with a middle XML layer. Also included is a shader library containing a basic set of shaders that developers can load and add shaders to. This framework will then be applied to some applications in Biomolecular Visualization.