Grant E. Haab

Compiler technology for future microprocessors

Advances in hardware technology have made it possible for microprocessors to execute a large number of instructions concurrently (i.e., in parallel). These microprocessors take advantage of the opportunity to execute instructions in parallel to increase the execution speed of a program. As in other forms of parallel processing, the performance of these microprocessors can vary greatly depending on the qualify of the software. In particular the quality of compilers can make an order of magnitude difference in performance. This paper presents a new generation of compiler technology that has emerged to deliver the large amount of instruction-level-parallelism that is already required by some current state-of-the-art microprocessors and will be required by more future microprocessors. We introduce critical components of the technology which deal with difficult problems that are encountered when compiling programs for a high degree of instruction-level-parallelism. We present examples to illustrate the functional requirements of these components. To provide more insight into the challenges involved, we present in-depth case studies on predicated compilation and maintenance of dependence information, two of the components that are largely missing from most current commercial compilers.

Data relocation and prefetching for programs with large data sets

Numerical applications frequently contain nested loop structures that process large arrays of data. The execution of these loop structures often produces memory reference patterns that poorly utilize data caches. Limited associativity and cache capacity result in cache conflict misses. Also, non-unit stride access patterns can cause low utilization of cache lines. Data copying has been proposed and investigated in order to reduce cache conflict misses [1][2], but this technique has a high execution overhead since it performs the copy operations entirely in software. We propose a combined hardware and software technique called data relocation and prefetching which eliminates much of the overhead of data copying through the else of special hardware. Furthermore, by relocating the data while performing software prefetching, the overhead of copying the data can be reduced further. Experimental results for data relocation and prefetching are encouraging and show a large improvement in cache performance.