3,250 research outputs found
Heuristics for register-constrained software pipelining
Software Pipelining is a loop scheduling technique that extracts parallelism from loops by overlapping the execution of several consecutive iterations. There has been a significant effort to produce throughput-optimal schedules under resource constraints, and more recently to produce throughput-optimal schedules with minimum register requirements. Unfortunately even a throughput-optimal schedule with minimum register requirements is useless if it requires more registers than those available in the target machine. This paper evaluates several techniques for producing register-constrained modulo schedules: increasing the initiation interval (II) and adding spill code. We show that, in general, increasing the II performs poorly and might not converge for some loops. The paper also presents an iterative spilling mechanism that can be applied to any software pipelining technique and proposes several heuristics in order to speed-up the scheduling processPeer ReviewedPostprint (published version
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
A mathematical formulation of the loop pipelining problem
This paper presents a mathematical model for the loop pipelining problem that considers several parameters for optimization and supports any combination of resource and timing constraints. The unrolling degree of the loop is one of the variables explored by the model. By using Farey’s series, an optimal exploration of the unrolling degree is performed and optimal solutions not considered by other methods are obtained. Finding an optimal schedule that minimizes resource and register requirements is solved by using an Integer linear programming (ILP) model. A novel paradigm called branch and prune is proposed to eficiently converge towards the optimal schedule and prune the search tree for integer solutions, thus drastically reducing the running time. This is the first formulation that combines the unrolling degree of the loop with timing and resource constraints in a mathematical model that guarantees optimal solutions.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Modulo scheduling with reduced register pressure
Software pipelining is a scheduling technique that is used by some product compilers in order to expose more instruction level parallelism out of innermost loops. Module scheduling refers to a class of algorithms for software pipelining. Most previous research on module scheduling has focused on reducing the number of cycles between the initiation of consecutive iterations (which is termed II) but has not considered the effect of the register pressure of the produced schedules. The register pressure increases as the instruction level parallelism increases. When the register requirements of a schedule are higher than the available number of registers, the loop must be rescheduled perhaps with a higher II. Therefore, the register pressure has an important impact on the performance of a schedule. This paper presents a novel heuristic module scheduling strategy that tries to generate schedules with the lowest II, and, from all the possible schedules with such II, it tries to select that with the lowest register requirements. The proposed method has been implemented in an experimental compiler and has been tested for the Perfect Club benchmarks. The results show that the proposed method achieves an optimal II for at least 97.5 percent of the loops and its compilation time is comparable to a conventional top-down approach, whereas the register requirements are lower. In addition, the proposed method is compared with some other existing methods. The results indicate that the proposed method performs better than other heuristic methods and almost as well as linear programming methods, which obtain optimal solutions but are impractical for product compilers because their computing cost grows exponentially with the number of operations in the loop body.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
Hypernode reduction modulo scheduling
Software pipelining is a loop scheduling technique that extracts parallelism from loops by overlapping the execution of several consecutive iterations. Most prior scheduling research has focused on achieving minimum execution time, without regarding register requirements. Most strategies tend to stretch operand lifetimes because they schedule some operations too early or too late. The paper presents a novel strategy that simultaneously schedules some operations late and other operations early, minimizing all the stretchable dependencies and therefore reducing the registers required by the loop. The key of this strategy is a pre-ordering that selects the order in which the operations will be scheduled. The results show that the method described in this paper performs better than other heuristic methods and almost as well as a linear programming method but requiring much less time to produce the schedules.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
A Comparative Study of Scheduling Techniques for Multimedia Applications on SIMD Pipelines
Parallel architectures are essential in order to take advantage of the
parallelism inherent in streaming applications. One particular branch of these
employ hardware SIMD pipelines. In this paper, we analyse several scheduling
techniques, namely ad hoc overlapped execution, modulo scheduling and modulo
scheduling with unrolling, all of which aim to efficiently utilize the special
architecture design. Our investigation focuses on improving throughput while
analysing other metrics that are important for streaming applications, such as
register pressure, buffer sizes and code size. Through experiments conducted on
several media benchmarks, we present and discuss trade-offs involved when
selecting any one of these scheduling techniques.Comment: Presented at DATE Friday Workshop on Heterogeneous Architectures and
Design Methods for Embedded Image Systems (HIS 2015) (arXiv:1502.07241
On-Chip Transparent Wire Pipelining (invited paper)
Wire pipelining has been proposed as a viable mean to break the discrepancy between decreasing gate delays and increasing wire delays in deep-submicron technologies. Far from being a straightforwardly applicable technique, this methodology requires a number of design modifications in order to insert it seamlessly in the current design flow. In this paper we briefly survey the methods presented by other researchers in the field and then we thoroughly analyze the solutions we recently proposed, ranging from system-level wire pipelining to physical design aspects
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Harmonic scheduling of linear recurrences in digital filter design
Linear difference equations involving recurrences are fundamental equations that describe many important signal processing applications. For many high sample rate digital filter applications, we need to effectively parallelize the linear difference equations used to describe digital filters - a difficult task due to the recurrences inherent in the data dependences. We present a novel approach, Harmonic Scheduling, that exploits parallelism in these recurrences beyond loop-carried dependencies, and which generates optimal schedules for parallel evaluation of linear difference equations with resource constraints. This approach also enables us to derive a parallel schedule with minimum control overhead, given an execution time with resource constraints. We also present a Harmonic Scheduling algorithm that generates optimal schedules for digital filters described by second-order difference equations with resource constraints
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