Modulo scheduling of loops in control-intensive non-numeric programs

• Authors: Daniel M. Lavery;Wen-mei W. Hwu
• Venue: Proceedings of the 29th annual ACM/IEEE international symposium on Microarchitecture
• Year: 1996

Much of the previous work on modulo scheduling has targeted numeric programs, in which, often, the majority of the loops are well-behaved loop-counter-based loops without early exits. In control-intensive non-numeric programs, the loops frequently have characteristics that make it more difficult to effectively apply modulo scheduling. These characteristics include multiple control flow paths, loops that are not based on a loop counter, and multiple exits. In these loops, the presence of unimportant paths with high resource usage or long dependence chains can penalize the important paths. A path that contains a hazard such as another nested loop can prohibit modulo scheduling of the loop. Control dependences can severely restrict the overlap of the blocks within and across iterations. This paper describes a set of methods that allow effective modulo scheduling of loops with multiple exits. The techniques include removal of control dependences to enable speculation, extensions to modulo variable expansion, and a new epilogue generation scheme. These methods can be used with superblock and hyperblock techniques to allow modulo scheduling of the selected paths of loops with arbitrary control flow. A case study is presented to show how these methods, combined with superblock techniques, enable modulo scheduling to be effectively applied to control-intensive non-numeric programs. Performance results for several SPEC CINT92 benchmarks and Unix utility programs are reported and demonstrate the applicability of modulo scheduling to this class of programs.