Optimistic Loop Optimization

Doerfert, Johannes and Grosser, Tobias and Hack, Sebastian


Compilers use static analyses to justify program optimizations. As every optimization must preserve the semantics of the original program, static analysis typically fall-back to conservative approximations. Consequently, the set of states for which the optimization is invalid is overapproximated and potential optimization opportunities are missed. Instead of justifying the optimization statically, a compiler can also synthesize preconditions that imply the correctness of the optimizations and are checked at the runtime of the program. In this paper, we present a framework to collect, generalize, and simplify assumptions based on Presburger arithmetic. We introduce different assumptions necessary to enable a variety of complex loop transformations and derive a (close to) minimal set of preconditions to validate them at runtime. Our evaluation shows that the runtime verification introduces negligible overhead and that the assumptions we propose almost always hold true. On a large benchmark set including SPEC and NPB our technique increases the number of modeled non-trivial loop nests by a factor of 3.9×.


| Publication | Preprint | Slides |