Applicable to arbitrary sequences and nests of loops, affine partitioning is a program transformation framework that unifies many previously proposed loop transformations, including unimodular transforms, fusion, fission, reindexing, scaling and statement reordering. Algorithms based on affine partitioning have been shown to be effective for parallelization and communication minimization. This paper presents algorithms that improve data locality using affine partitioning. Blocking and array contraction are two important optimizations that have been shown to be useful for data locality. Blocking creates a set of inner loops so that data brought into the faster levels of the memory hierarchy can be reused. Array contraction reduces an array to a scalar variable and thereby reduces the number of memory operations executed and the memory footprint. Loop transforms are often necessary to make blocking and array contraction possible.

The SUIF Explorer is an interactive parallelization tool that is more effective than previous systems in minimizing the number of lines of code that require programmer assistance. First, the interprocedural analyses in the SUIF system is successful in parallelizing many coarse-grain loops, thus minimizing the number of spurious dependences requiring attention. Second, the system uses dynamic execution analyzers to identify those important loops that are likely to be parallelizable. Third, the SUIF Explorer is the first to apply program slicing to aid programmers in interactive parallelization. The system guides the programmer in the parallelization process using a set of sophisticated visualization techniques. This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of the SUIF Explorer with three case studies. The programmer was able to speed up all three programs by examining only a small fraction of the program and privatizing a few variables. 1. Introduction Exploiting coarse-grain parallelism i...

We present an approach for synthesizing transformations to enhance locality in imperfectly-nested loops. The key idea is to embed the iteration space of every statement in a loop nest into a special iteration space called the product space. The product space can be viewed as a perfectly-nested loop nest, so embedding generalizes techniques like code sinking and loop fusion that are used in ad hoc ways in current compilers to produce perfectly-nested loops from imperfectly-nested ones. In contrast to these ad hoc techniques however, our embeddings are chosen carefully to enhance locality. The product space is then transformed further to enhance locality, after which fully permutable loops are tiled, and code is generated. We evaluate the effectiveness of this approach for dense numerical linear algebra benchmarks, relaxation codes, and the tomcatv code from the SPEC benchmarks. 1. BACKGROUND AND PREVIOUSWORK Sophisticated algorithms based on polyhedral algebra have been developed for determining good sequences of linear loop transformations (permutation, skewing, reversal and scaling) for enhancing locality in perfectly-nested loops 1. Highlights of this technology are the following. The iterations of the loop nest are modeled as points in an integer lattice, and linear loop transformations are modeled as nonsingular matrices mapping one lattice to another. A sequence of loop transformations is modeled by the product of matrices representing the individual transformations; since the set of nonsingular matrices is closed under matrix product, this means that a sequence of linear loop transformations can be represented by a nonsingular matrix. The problem of finding an optimal sequence of linear loop transformations is thus reduced to the problem of finding an integer matrix that satisfies some desired property, permitting the full machinery of matrix methods and lattice theory to ¢ This work was supported by NSF grants CCR-9720211, EIA-9726388, ACI-9870687,EIA-9972853. £ A perfectly-nested loop is a set of loops in which all assignment statements are contained in the innermost loop.

An affine partitioning framework unifies many useful program transforms such as unimodular transformations (interchange, reversal, skewing), loop fusion, fission, scaling, reindexing, and statement reordering. This paper presents an algorithm, based on this unified framework, that maximizes parallelism while minimizing communication in programs with arbitrary loop nestings and affine data accesses. Our algorithm can find the optimal affine partition that maximizes the degree of parallelism with the minimum degree of synchronizations. In addition, it uses a greedy algorithm to minimize communication between loops heuristically by aligning the computation partitions for different loops, trading off excess degrees of parallelism, and choosing pipelined parallelism over doall parallelism if it can significantly reduce the communication. The algorithm is optimal in maximizing the degrees of parallelism that require (1) no communication, (2) near-neighbor communication and a constant number ...

Single-threaded programming is already considered a complicated task. The move to multi-threaded programming only increases the complexity and cost involved in software development due to rewriting legacy code, training of the programmer, increased debugging of the program, and efforts to avoid race conditions, deadlocks, and other problems associated with parallel programming. To address these costs, other approaches, such as automatic thread extraction, have been explored. Unfortunately, the amount of parallelism that has been automatically extracted is generally insufficient to keep many cores busy. This paper argues that this lack of parallelism is not an intrinsic limitation of the sequential programming model, but rather occurs for two reasons. First, there exists no framework for automatic thread extraction that brings together key existing state-of-the-art compiler and hardware techniques. This paper shows that such a framework can yield scalable parallelization on several SPEC CINT2000 benchmarks. Second, existing sequential programming languages force programmers to define a single legal program outcome, rather than allowing for a range of legal outcomes. This paper shows that natural extensions to the sequential programming model enable parallelization for the remainder of the SPEC CINT2000 suite. Our experience demonstrates that, by changing only 60 source code lines, all of the C benchmarks in the SPEC CINT2000 suite were parallelizable by automatic thread extraction. This process, constrained by the limits of modern optimizing compilers, yielded a speedup of 454 % on these applications. 1

We present the design and implementation of an automatic polyhedral source-to-source transformation framework that can optimize regular programs (sequences of possibly imperfectly nested loops) for parallelism and locality simultaneously. Through this work, we show the practicality of analytical model-driven automatic transformation in the polyhedral model.Unlike previous polyhedral frameworks, our approach is an end-to-end fully automatic one driven by an integer linear optimization framework that takes an explicit view of finding good ways of tiling for parallelism and locality using affine transformations. The framework has been implemented into a tool to automatically generate OpenMP parallel code from C program sections. Experimental results from the tool show very high performance for local and parallel execution on multi-cores, when compared with state-of-the-art compiler frameworks from the research community as well as the best native production compilers. The system also enables the easy use of powerful empirical/iterative optimization for general arbitrarily nested loop sequences.

Tiling is one of the more important transformations for enhancing locality of reference in programs. Tiling of perfectly-nested loop nests (which are loop nests in which all assignment statements are contained in the innermost loop) is well understood. In practice, most loop nests are imperfectly-nested, so existing compilers heuristically try to find a sequence of transformations that convert such loop nests into perfectly-nested ones but not always succeed. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to tiling imperfectly-nested loop nests. The key idea is to embed the iteration space of every statement in the imperfectly-nested loop nest into a special space called the product space. The set of possible embeddings is constrained so that the resulting product space can be legally tiled. From this set we choose embeddings that enhance data reuse. We evaluate the effectiveness of this approach for dense numerical linear algebra benchmarks, relaxation codes, and the tomcatv code from the...

Emerging microprocessors offer unprecedented parallel computing capabilities and deeper memory hierarchies, increasing the importance of loop transformations in optimizing compilers. Because compiler heuristics rely on simplistic performance models, and because they are bound to a limited set of transformations sequences, they only uncover a fraction of the peak performance on typical benchmarks. Iterative optimization is a maturing framework to address these limitations, but so far, it was not successfully applied complex loop transformation sequences because of the combinatorics of the optimization search space. We focus on the class of loop transformation which can be expressed as one-dimensional affine schedules. We define a systematic exploration method to enumerate the space of all legal, distinct transformations in this class. This method is based on an upstream characterization, as opposed to state-of-the-art downstream filtering approaches. Our results demonstrate orders of magnitude improvements in the size of the search space and in the convergence speed of a dedicated iterative optimization heuristic. 1.

High-level loop optimizations are necessary to achieve good performance over a wide variety of processors. Their performance impact can be significant because they involve in-depth program transformations that aiming to sustain a balanced workload over the computational, storage, and communication resources of the target architecture. Therefore, it is mandatory that the compiler accurately models the target architecture and the effects of complex code restructuring. However, because optimizing compilers (1) use simplistic performance models that abstract away many of the complexities of modern architectures, (2) rely on inaccurate dependence analysis, and (3) lack frameworks to express complex interactions of transformation sequences, they typically uncover only a fraction of the peak performance available on many applications. We propose a complete iterative framework to address these issues. We rely on the polyhedral model to construct and traverse a large and expressive search space. This space encompasses only legal, distinct versions resulting from the restructuring of any static control loop nest. We first propose a feedback-driven iterative heuristic tailored to the search space properties of the polyhedral model. Though, it quickly converges to good solutions for small kernels, larger benchmarks containing higher dimensional spaces are more challenging and our heuristic misses opportunities for significant performance improvement. Thus, we introduce the use of a genetic algorithm with specialized operators that leverage the polyhedral representation of program dependences. We provide experimental evidence that the genetic algorithm effectively traverses huge optimization spaces, achieving good performance improvements on large loop nests.

This papcr presents an optimal algorithm lor detecting line or medium grain parallelism in nested loops whose dependences are described by an approximation of distance vectors by polyhedra. In particular, this algorithm is optimal for the classical approximation by direction sectors. This result gcncruli/es. to the case of several statements. Wolf and Lam's algorithm which is optimal for a single statement. Our algorithm relies on a dependence uniformi/ation process and on paralleli/ation techniques related to system of uniform recurrence equations. It can also be viewed as a combination of both Allen and Kennedy's algorithm and Wolf and Lam's algorithm.