Combinatorial Problems in Compiler Optimization
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Date
2013-04-22T22:03:37Z
Authors
Beg, Mirza Omer
Advisor
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Waterloo
Abstract
Several important compiler optimizations such as instruction scheduling
and register allocation are fundamentally hard and are usually solved using heuristics
or approximate solutions.
In contrast, this thesis examines optimal solutions to three combinatorial problems in compiler optimization.
The first problem addresses instruction scheduling for clustered
architectures, popular in embedded systems. Given a set of
instructions the optimal solution gives the best possible schedule for a given clustered
architectural model. The problem is solved
using a decomposition technique applied to constraint programming which determines the spatial and
temporal schedule using an integrated approach. The experiments
show that our solver can tradeoff some compile time efficiency to solve most instances in
standard benchmarks giving significant performance improvements.
The second problem addresses
instruction selection in the compiler code generation phase.
Given the intermediate representation of code the optimal solution
determines the sequence of equivalent machine instructions as it optimizes for code size.
This thesis shows that a large number of benchmark instances can be solved optimally
using constraint programming techniques.
The third problem addressed is the placement of data in memory for efficient
cache utilization.
Using the data access patterns of a given program, our algorithm
determines a placement to reorganize data in
memory which would result in fewer cache misses.
By focusing on graph theoretic placement techniques it is
shown that there exist, in special cases, efficient and optimal algorithms for
data placement that significantly
improve cache utilization. We also propose heuristic solutions for solving larger instances
for which provably optimal solutions cannot be determined using polynomial time algorithms.
We demonstrate that cache hit rates can
be significantly improved by using profiling techniques over a wide range of benchmarks and cache configurations.
Description
Keywords
Compilers, Optimization, Constraint programming, Cache optimization