Cédric Bastoul

The polyhedral model is more widely applicable than you think

The polyhedral model is a powerful framework for automatic optimization and parallelization. It is based on an algebraic representation of programs, allowing to construct and search for complex sequences of optimizations. This model is now mature and reaches production compilers. The main limitation of the polyhedral model is known to be its restriction to statically predictable, loop-based program parts. This paper removes this limitation, allowing to operate on general data-dependent control-flow. We embed control and exit predicates as first-class citizens of the algebraic representation, from program analysis to code generation. Complementing previous (partial) attempts in this direction, our work concentrates on extending the code generation step and does not compromise the expressiveness of the model. We present experimental evidence that our extension is relevant for program optimization and parallelization, showing performance improvements on benchmarks that were thought to be out of reach of the polyhedral model.

Loop transformations: convexity, pruning and optimization

High-level loop transformations are a key instrument in mapping computational kernels to effectively exploit the resources in modern processor architectures. Nevertheless, selecting required compositions of loop transformations to achieve this remains a significantly challenging task; current compilers may be off by orders of magnitude in performance compared to hand-optimized programs. To address this fundamental challenge, we first present a convex characterization of all distinct, semantics-preserving, multidimensional affine transformations. We then bring together algebraic, algorithmic, and performance analysis results to design a tractable optimization algorithm over this highly expressive space. Our framework has been implemented and validated experimentally on a representative set of benchmarks running on state-of-the-art multi-core platforms.

Polyhedral code generation in the real world

The polyhedral model is known to be a powerful framework to reason about high level loop transformations. Recent developments in optimizing compilers broke some generally accepted ideas about the limitations of this model. First, thanks to advances in dependence analysis for irregular access patterns, its applicability which was supposed to be limited to very simple loop nests has been extended to wide code regions. Then, new algorithms made it possible to compute the target code for hundreds of statements while this code generation step was expected not to be scalable. Such theoretical advances and new software tools allowed actors from both academia and industry to study more complex and realistic cases. Unfortunately, despite strong optimization potential of a given transformation for e.g., parallelism or data locality, code generation may still be challenging or result in high control overhead. This paper presents scalable code generation methods that make possible the application of increasingly complex program transformations. By studying the transformations themselves, we show how it is possible to benefit from their properties to dramatically improve both code generation quality and space/time complexity, with respect to the best state-of-the-art code generation tool. In addition, we build on these improvements to present a new algorithm improving generated code performance for strided domains and reindexed schedules.

Predictive Modeling in a Polyhedral Optimization Space

High-level program optimizations, such as loop transformations, are critical for high performance on multi-core targets. However, complex sequences of loop transformations are often required to expose parallelism (both coarse-grain and fine-grain) and improve data locality. The polyhedral compilation framework has proved to be very effective at representing these complex sequences and restructuring compute-intensive applications, seamlessly handling perfectly and imperfectly nested loops. It models arbitrarily complex sequences of loop transformations in a unified mathematical framework, dramatically increasing the expressiveness (and expected effectiveness) of the loop optimization stage. Nevertheless identifying the most effective loop transformations remains a major challenge: current state-of-the-art heuristics in polyhedral frameworks simply fail to expose good performance over a wide range of numerical applications. Their lack of effectiveness is mainly due to simplistic performance models that do not reflect the complexity today’s processors (CPU, cache behavior, etc.). We address the problem of selecting the best polyhedral optimizations with dedicated machine learning models, trained specifically on the target machine. We show that these models can quickly select high-performance optimizations with very limited iterative search. We decouple the problem of selecting good complex sequences of optimizations in two stages: (1) we narrow the set of candidate optimizations using static cost models to select the loop transformations that implement specific high-level optimizations (e.g., tiling, parallelism, etc.); (2) we predict the performance of each high-level complex optimization sequence with trained models that take as input a performance-counter characterization of the original program. Our end-to-end framework is validated using numerous benchmarks on two modern multi-core platforms. We investigate a variety of different machine learning algorithms and hardware counters, and we obtain performance improvements over productions compilers ranging on average from

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