Data Dependence and DataFlow Analysis of Arrays.pdfVIP

Data Dependence and Data-Flow Analysis of Arrays Dror E. Maydan, Saman P. Amarasinghe and Monica S. Lam Computer Systems Laboratory Stanford University, CA 94305 1 Introduction The power of any compiler is derived from, and also limited by, its program analyzers. Finding the right abstraction for program analysis is crucial in the development of compiler technology. For the abstraction to be useful, it must include sufficient information to support the code optimizations and transformations. In addition, it must be tractable to extract the information from at least a large enough set of programs. Data dependence, distance vectors and direction vectors are important data abstractions that have been proven useful for parallelization and loop transformations, and they are applicable to a large set of programs. The parallelizing compiler research frontier is currently pushing the limits of traditional data dependence analysis. For example, evaluation of today’s compiler technology suggests that reuse of data arrays in programs greatly reduces the opportunities for parallelism. Many more loops can be parallelized by privatizing the work arrays, that is, assigning a separate copy of the array to each processor. The information needed to support such an optimization is not just memory disambiguation, that is, if two references can refer to the same location. To determine if each iteration can have its own copy of the array, we need data-flow analysis on individual array elements. Another important research topic is code generation for distributed memory machines. The compiler is responsible for maintaining the coher