A probabilistic pointer analysis for speculative optimizations

Silva, Jeff Da; Steffan, J. Gregory

doi:10.1145/1168857.1168908

Cited by 20 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 34 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…But an equally important question is when are these optimizations beneficial. One can use heuristics for this purpose [12], but a more precise method is to profile the application. Fortunately, we can leverage the same hardware support that we use for DeAliaser to collect a profile with high efficiency.…”

Section: The Cost-benefit Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

DeAliaser

Ahn

Duan

Torrellas

2013

Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Alias analysis is a critical component in many compiler optimizations. A promising approach to reduce the complexity of alias analysis is to use speculation. The approach consists of performing optimizations assuming the alias relationships that are true most of the time, and repairing the code when such relationships are found not to hold through runtime checks.This paper proposes a general alias speculation scheme that leverages upcoming hardware support for transactions with the help of some ISA extensions. The ability of transactions to checkpoint and roll back frees the compiler to pursue aggressive optimizations without having to worry about recovery code. Also, exposing the memory conflict detection hardware in transactions to software allows runtime checking of aliases with little or no overhead. We test the potential of the novel alias speculation approach with Loop Invariant Code Motion (LICM), Global Value Numbering (GVN), and Partial Redundancy Elimination (PRE) optimization passes. On average, they are shown to reduce program execution time by 9% in SPEC FP2006 applications and 3% in SPEC INT2006 applications over the alias analysis of a state-of-the-art compiler.

show abstract

Section: The Cost-benefit Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

DeAliaser

Ahn

Duan

Torrellas

2013

Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…These techniques range from traditional techniques like reduction expansions [19,21] to more modern techniques, such as aggressive alias analysis [5], speculative pointer analysis [28], or variable value analysis [22]. Proving two memory operations do not conflict or proving that a variable holds a constant value at a certain program point can be invaluable in unlocking parallelism.…”

Section: Compiler and Hardware Supportmentioning

confidence: 99%

Revisiting the Sequential Programming Model for Multi-Core

Bridges

Vachharajani

Zhang

et al. 2007

40th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO 2007)

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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. 40th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture

show abstract

A Systematic Approach to Probabilistic Pointer Analysis

Pierro

Hankin

Wiklicky

2007

Programming Languages and Systems

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract. We present a formal framework for syntax directed probabilistic program analysis. Our focus is on probabilistic pointer analysis. We show how to obtain probabilistic points-to matrices and their relational counterparts in a systematic way via Probabilistic Abstract Interpretation (PAI). The analysis is based on a non-standard semantics for a simple imperative language which corresponds to a Discrete-Time Markov Chain (DTMC). The generator of this DTMC is constructed by composing (via tensor product) the probabilistic control flow of the program and the data updates of the different variables at individual program points. The dimensionality of the concrete semantics is in general prohibitively large but abstraction (via PAI) allows for a drastic (exponential) reduction of size.

show abstract

A probabilistic pointer analysis for speculative optimizations

Cited by 20 publications

References 34 publications

DeAliaser

DeAliaser

Revisiting the Sequential Programming Model for Multi-Core

A Systematic Approach to Probabilistic Pointer Analysis

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About