Optimal and efficient speculation-based partial redundancy elimination

Abstract

Existing profile-guided partial redundancy elimination (PRE) methods use speculation to enable the removal of partial redundancies along more frequently executed paths at the expense of introducing additional expression evaluations along less frequently executed paths. While being capable of minimizing the number of expression evaluations in some cases, they are, in general, not computationally optimal in achieving this objective. In addition, the experimental results for their effectiveness are mostly missing. This work addresses the following three problems: (1) Is the computational optimality of speculative PRE solvable in polynomial time? (2) Is edge profiling - less costly than path profiling - sufficient to guarantee the computational optimality? (3) Is the optimal algorithm (if one exists) lightweight enough to be used efficiently in a dynamic compiler? In this paper, we provide positive answers to the first two problems and promising results to the third. We present an algorithm that analyzes edge insertion points based on an edge profile. Our algorithm guarantees optimally that the total number of computations for an expression in the transformed code is always minimized with respect to the edge profile given. This implies that edge profiling, which is less costly than path profiling, is sufficient to guarantee this optimality. The key in the development of our algorithm lies in the removal of some non-essential edges (and consequently, all resulting non-essential nodes) from a flow graph so that the problem of finding an optimal code motion is reduced to one of finding a minimal cut in the reduced (flow) graph thus obtained. We have implemented our algorithm in Intel's Open Runtime Platform (ORP). Our preliminary results over a number of Java benchmarks show that our algorithm is lightweight and can be potentially a practical component in a dynamic compiler. As a result, our algorithm can also be profitably employed in a profile-guided static compiler in which compilation cost can often be sacrificed for code efficiency.