Modern microprocessors are equipped with single instruction multiple data
(SIMD) or vector instruction sets which allow compilers to exploit superword
level parallelism (SLP), a type of fine-grained parallelism. Current SLP
auto-vectorization techniques use heuristics to discover vectorization
opportunities in high-level language code. These heuristics are fragile, local
and typically only present one vectorization strategy that is either accepted
or rejected by a cost model. We present goSLP, a novel SLP auto-vectorization
framework which solves the statement packing problem in a pairwise optimal
manner. Using an integer linear programming (ILP) solver, goSLP searches the
entire space of statement packing opportunities for a whole function at a time,
while limiting total compilation time to a few minutes. Furthermore, goSLP
optimally solves the vector permutation selection problem using dynamic
programming. We implemented goSLP in the LLVM compiler infrastructure,
achieving a geometric mean speedup of 7.58% on SPEC2017fp, 2.42% on SPEC2006fp
and 4.07% on NAS benchmarks compared to LLVM's existing SLP auto-vectorizer.Comment: Published at OOPSLA 201