This is a project I have been working on with my advisor Ras Bodik since the Fall of 2003 in collaboration with Kemal Ebciglou and Rodric Rabbah from MIT, with the support of Vivek Sarkar, also from Watson.

StreamBit is a tool that aims to increase productivity in the development of applications that process streams at the bit level. Such bit-stream programs occur in several domains such as cryptography and coding, and they are characterized by strong performance requirements and huge performance differences between highly tuned implementations and more naively written ones. For this reason, widely used implementations often combine clever high-level optimizations with careful low-level coding. Our tool instead uses StreamIt, a high level Domain Specific Language for streaming applications, combined with optimization sketches to allow for separation of concerns between the algorithm specification and the implementation details, greatly simplifying the development process.

StreamBit is a transformation system; the original program is transformed into an efficient implementation by applying a set of semantics preserving transformations. The user controls the transformation process by providing sketches that tell the system how the code should look like after particular transformation steps.