A language for conveying the aliasing properties of dynamic, pointer-based data structures

Abstract

High-performance architectures rely upon powerful optimizing and parallelizing compilers to maximize performance. Such compilers need accurate program analysis to enable their performance-enhancing transformations. In the domain of program analysis for parallelization, pointer analysis is a difficult and increasingly common problem. When faced with dynamic, pointer-based data structures, existing solutions are either too limited in the types of data structures they can analyze, or require too much effort on the part of the programmer. Recently we proposed a compromising approach, in which the programmer supplies some small amount of information, and the compiler performs the remaining analysis [HHN92a]. However, the language for conveying this information is unable to accurately describe a number of important data structures, and does not easily support the compiler's underlying alias analysis. In this paper we present a more powerful description language that also directly supports alias analysis. Ultimately, this will lead to more accurate program analysis for a larger class of programs, and hence the increased application of performance-enhancing transformations on these programs.

Dynamic Scheduling with Process Migration

“…The first one is the linpack C sequential program, which solves a dense system of linear equations with Gaussian elimination [11]. The second is the bitonic program written by Joe Hummel [18], which builds a random binary tree and then sorts it. The third is gzip, a popular compression utility.…”

Programmer specified pointer independence

“…We describe a much more general approach. ASAP [15] is a language for describing aliasing properties within data structures. ASAP also relies upon the programmer to ensure correctness.…”

Increasing the Accuracy of Shape and Safety Analysis of Pointer-Based Codes

“…Hummel et al [7,6] describe an approach in which the programmer specifies, in the ADDS and ASAP languages, a set of data structures properties using direction and orthogonality attributes as well as structure invariants. The compiler is left with the task of checking if any of the statement in the program violate the axioms and reports if so.…”