8,378 research outputs found
Survey on Combinatorial Register Allocation and Instruction Scheduling
Register allocation (mapping variables to processor registers or memory) and
instruction scheduling (reordering instructions to increase instruction-level
parallelism) are essential tasks for generating efficient assembly code in a
compiler. In the last three decades, combinatorial optimization has emerged as
an alternative to traditional, heuristic algorithms for these two tasks.
Combinatorial optimization approaches can deliver optimal solutions according
to a model, can precisely capture trade-offs between conflicting decisions, and
are more flexible at the expense of increased compilation time.
This paper provides an exhaustive literature review and a classification of
combinatorial optimization approaches to register allocation and instruction
scheduling, with a focus on the techniques that are most applied in this
context: integer programming, constraint programming, partitioned Boolean
quadratic programming, and enumeration. Researchers in compilers and
combinatorial optimization can benefit from identifying developments, trends,
and challenges in the area; compiler practitioners may discern opportunities
and grasp the potential benefit of applying combinatorial optimization
Parallel local search for solving Constraint Problems on the Cell Broadband Engine (Preliminary Results)
We explore the use of the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/BE for short) for
combinatorial optimization applications: we present a parallel version of a
constraint-based local search algorithm that has been implemented on a
multiprocessor BladeCenter machine with twin Cell/BE processors (total of 16
SPUs per blade). This algorithm was chosen because it fits very well the
Cell/BE architecture and requires neither shared memory nor communication
between processors, while retaining a compact memory footprint. We study the
performance on several large optimization benchmarks and show that this
achieves mostly linear time speedups, even sometimes super-linear. This is
possible because the parallel implementation might explore simultaneously
different parts of the search space and therefore converge faster towards the
best sub-space and thus towards a solution. Besides getting speedups, the
resulting times exhibit a much smaller variance, which benefits applications
where a timely reply is critical
Computational Complexity for Physicists
These lecture notes are an informal introduction to the theory of
computational complexity and its links to quantum computing and statistical
mechanics.Comment: references updated, reprint available from
http://itp.nat.uni-magdeburg.de/~mertens/papers/complexity.shtm
Tree Contraction, Connected Components, Minimum Spanning Trees: a GPU Path to Vertex Fitting
Standard parallel computing operations are considered in the context of algorithms for solving 3D graph problems which have applications, e.g., in vertex finding in HEP. Exploiting GPUs for tree-accumulation and graph algorithms is challenging: GPUs offer extreme computational power and high memory-access bandwidth, combined with a model of fine-grained parallelism perhaps not suiting the irregular distribution of linked representations of graph data structures. Achieving data-race free computations may demand serialization through atomic transactions, inevitably producing poor parallel performance. A Minimum Spanning Tree algorithm for GPUs is presented, its implementation discussed, and its efficiency evaluated on GPU and multicore architectures
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