Practical dependence testing

Abstract

Precise and efficient dependence tests are essential to the effectiveness of a parallelizing compiler. This paper proposes a dependence testing scheme based on classifying pairs of subscripted variable references. Exact yet fast dependence tests are presented for certain classes of array references, as well as empirical results showing that these references dominate scientific Fortran codes. These dependence tests are being implemented at Rice University in both PFC, a parallelizing compiler, and ParaScope, a parallel programming environment.