Investigating Adaptive Compilation using the MIPSPro Compiler

Despite the astonishing increases in processor performance over the last 40 years, delivered application performance remains a critical issue for many important problems. Compilers play a critical role in determining that performance. A modern optimizing compiler contains many transformations that attempt to increase application performance. However, the best combination of transformations is an application-specific issue. Recent systems such as FFTW and ATLAS have demonstrated how code that adapts its behavior to target machine parameters can deliver better performance than code that adopts a single strategy for all machines. Unfortunately, developing these systems required significant amounts of time by experts. Adaptive compilation (systems where the compiler chooses an appropriat