Modeling the conflicting demands of parallelism and Temporal/Spatial locality in affine scheduling

Abstract

The construction of effective loop nest optimizers and parallelizers remains challenging despite decades of work in the area. Due to the increasing diversity of loop-intensive applications and to the complex memory/computation hierarchies in modern processors, optimization heuristics are pulled towards conflicting goals, highlighting the lack of a systematic approach to optimizing locality and parallelism. Acknowledging these conflicting demands on loop nest optimization, we propose an algorithmic template capable of modeling the multi-level parallelism and the temporal/spatial locality of multiprocessors and accelerators. This algorithmic template orchestrates a collection of parameterizable, linear optimization problems over a polyhedral space of semantics-preserving transformations. While the overall problem is not convex, effective algorithms can be derived from this template delivering unprecedented performance portability over GPU and multicore CPU. We discuss the rationale for this algorithmic template and validate it on representative computational kernels/benchmarks.