On the effectiveness of register moves to minimise post-pass unrolling in software pipelined loops

Mounira Bachir, Albert Cohen, Sid-Ahmed-Ali Touati
2012 2012 International Conference on High Performance Computing & Simulation (HPCS)  
Software pipelining is a powerful technique to expose fine-grain parallelism, but it results in variables staying alive across more than one kernel iteration. It requires periodic register allocation and is challenging for code generation: the lack of a reliable solution currently restricts the applicability of software pipelining. The classical software solution that does not alter the computation throughput consists in unrolling the loop a posteriori [12], [11] . However, the resulting
more » ... ng degree is often unacceptable and may reach absurd levels. Alternatively, loop unrolling can be avoided thanks to software register renaming. This is achieved through the insertion of move operations, but this may increase the initiation interval (II) which nullifies the benefits of software pipelining. This article aims at tightly controling the post-pass loop unrolling necessary to generate code. We study the potential of live range splitting to reduce kernel loop unrolling, introducing additional move instructions without inscreasing the II. We provide a complete formalisation of the problem, an algorithm, and extensive experiments. Our algorithm yields low unrolling degrees in most cases -with no increase of the II.
doi:10.1109/hpcsim.2012.6266972 dblp:conf/ieeehpcs/BachirCT12 fatcat:2gwcmkisarcvxbpiu7v635rtey