A Survey of General and Architecture-Specific Compiler Optimization Techniques

Experience with commercial and research high-performance architectures has indicated that the compiler plays an increasingly important role in real application performance. In particular, the difficulty in programming some of the so-called "hardware first" machines underscores the need for integrating architecture design and compilation strategy. In addition, architectures featuring novel hardware optimizations require compilers that can take advantage of them in order to be commercially viable. We survey a variety of compiler optimization techniques of current interest: general techniques, vectorizing compiler techniques, fine-grained parallelism techniques. For architecture-specific techniques, we analyze what features of the architecture require special attention from the compiler in order to achieve best performance, and summarize implementation complexity and observed performance for a variety of past approaches. We pay particular attention to hardware/software trade-offs and limi..