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Towards an Achievable Performance for the Loop Nests

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Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing (LCPC 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 11882))

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Abstract

Numerous code optimization techniques, including loop nest optimizations, have been developed over the last four decades. Loop optimization techniques transform loop nests to improve the performance of the code on a target architecture, including exposing parallelism. Finding and evaluating an optimal, semantic-preserving sequence of transformations is a complex problem. The sequence is guided using heuristics and/or analytical models and there is no way of knowing how close it gets to optimal performance or if there is any headroom for improvement.

This paper makes two contributions. First, it uses a comparative analysis of loop optimizations/transformations across multiple compilers to determine how much headroom may exist for each compiler. And second, it presents an approach to characterize the loop nests based on their hardware performance counter values and a Machine Learning approach that predicts which compiler will generate the fastest code for a loop nest. The prediction is made for both auto-vectorized, serial compilation and for auto-parallelization. The results show that the headroom for state-of-the-art compilers ranges from 1.10x to 1.42x for the serial code and from 1.30x to 1.71x for the auto-parallelized code. These results are based on the Machine Learning predictions.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by NSF award XPS 1533926.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, USA

    Aniket Shivam, Neftali Watkinson, Alexandru Nicolau & Alexander V. Veidenbaum

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, USA

    David Padua

Authors
  1. Aniket Shivam
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  2. Neftali Watkinson
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  3. Alexandru Nicolau
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  4. David Padua
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  5. Alexander V. Veidenbaum
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Aniket Shivam .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA

    Mary Hall

  2. University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA

    Hari Sundar

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Shivam, A., Watkinson, N., Nicolau, A., Padua, D., Veidenbaum, A.V. (2019). Towards an Achievable Performance for the Loop Nests. In: Hall, M., Sundar, H. (eds) Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing. LCPC 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11882. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34627-0_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34627-0_6

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-34626-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-34627-0

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