Paper Info
Title
A cost model for a graph-based intermediate-representation in a dynamic compiler.
Abstract
Compilers provide many architecture-agnostic, high-level optimizations trading off peak performance for code size. High-level optimizations typically cannot precisely reason about their impact, as they are applied before the final shape of the generated machine code can be determined. However, they still need a way to estimate their transformation’s impact on the performance of a compilation unit. Therefore, compilers typically resort to modelling these estimations as trade-off functions that heuristically guide optimization decisions. Compilers such as Graal implement many such handcrafted heuristic trade-off functions, which are tuned for one particular high-level optimization. Heuristic trade-off functions base their reasoning on limited knowledge of the compilation unit, often causing transformations that heavily increase code size or even decrease performance. To address this problem, we propose a cost model for Graal’s high-level intermediate representation that models relative operation latencies and operation sizes in order to be used in trade-off functions of compiler optimizations. We implemented the cost model in Graal and used it in two code-duplication-based optimizations. This allowed us to perform a more fine-grained code size trade-off in existing compiler optimizations, reducing the code size increase of our optimizations by up to 50% compared to not using the proposed cost model in these optimizations, without sacrificing performance. Our evaluation demonstrates that the cost model allows optimizations to perform fine-grained code size and performance trade-offs outperforming hard-coded heuristics.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1145/3281287.3281290
SPLASH '18: Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity Boston MA USA November, 2018
Keywords
Field
DocType
Intermediate Representation, Cost Model, Performance Estimation, Just-In-Time Compilation
Heuristic,Programming language,Computer science,Optimizing compiler,Compiler,Heuristics,Machine code,Intermediate language,Just-in-time compilation,Translation unit (programming)
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-6071-5
0
0.34
References 
Authors
21
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
David Leopoldseder161.83
Lukas Stadler229517.19
Manuel Rigger3265.86
Thomas Würthinger439625.63
Hanspeter Mössenböck578188.17