HyperLink   Profile-Assisted Instruction Scheduling.
   
Publication Year:
  1994
Authors
  William Y. Chen, Scott A. Mahlke, Nancy J. Warter, Sadun Anik, Wen-mei Hwu
   
Published:
  International Journal for parallel Programming, Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 151-181, April 1994
   
Abstract:

Instruction schedulers for superscalar and VLIW processors must expose sufficient instruction-level parallelism to the hardware in order to achieve high performance. Traditional compiler instruction scheduling techniques typically take into account the constraints imposed by all execution scenarios in the program. However, there are additional opportunities to increase instruction-level parallelism for the frequent execution scenarios at the expense of the less frequent ones. Profile information identifies these important execution scenarios in a program. In this paper, two major categories of profile information are studied: control-flow and memory-dependence. Profile-assisted code scheduling techniques have been incorporated into the IMPACT-I compiler. These techniques are acyclic global scheduling and software pipelining. This paper describes the scheduling algorithms, highlights the modifications required to use profile information, and explains the hardware and compiler support for dealing with hazards that arise from aggressive use of profile information. The effectiveness of these profile-based scheduling techniques is evaluated for a range of superscalar and VLIW processors.