Automatic transformations for communication-minimized parallelization and locality optimization in the polyhedral model

Abstract

The polyhedral model provides powerful abstractions to optimize loop nests with regular accesses. Affine transformations in this model capture a complex sequence of execution-reordering loop transformations that can improve performance by parallelization as well as locality enhancement. Although a significant body of research has addressed affine scheduling and partitioning, the problem of automatically finding good affine transforms for communication-optimized coarse-grained parallelization together with locality optimization for the general case of arbitrarily-nested loop sequences remains a challenging problem. We propose an automatic transformation framework to optimize arbitrarily-nested loop sequences with affine dependences for parallelism and locality simultaneously. The approach finds good tiling hyperplanes by embedding a powerful and versatile cost function into an Integer Linear Programming formulation. These tiling hyperplanes are used for communication-minimized coarse-grained parallelization as well as for locality optimization. The approach enables the minimization of inter-tile communication volume in the processor space, and minimization of reuse distances for local execution at each node. Programs requiring one-dimensional versus multi-dimensional time schedules (with scheduling-based approaches) are all handled with the same algorithm. Synchronization-free parallelism, permutable loops or pipelined parallelism at various levels can be detected. Preliminary studies of the framework show promising results. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.