High-Level Information - An Approach for Integrating Front-End and Back-End Compilers

Existing compilers for automatically parallelizing application programs are often divided into parallelizing frontend compilers and optimizing back-end compilers. The front-end compilers perform high-level program analysis to identify dependences among relatively coarse-grained program units, such as subroutines and loop iterations, and perform transformations on these large units. The back-end compilers, on the other hand, perform analyses and optimizations on relatively finer-grained operations, such as machine instructions. Due to a lack of high-level information, however, the back-end compilers miss potential optimizations, and the scope of the optimizations is limited to only short-range local transformations. In this paper we propose a new universal High-Level Information (HLI) format to effectively integrate front-end and back-end compilers by passing front-end information to the back-end compiler. Importing this information into an existing back-end leverages the state-of-the-a..