LIBRARIES A Technique for Compilation to Exposed Memory Hierarchy

A tremendous amount of compiler research effort over the past ten years has been devoted to compensating for the deficiencies in hardware cache memory hierarchy. In this thesis, we propose a refocus of these energies towards compilation for memory hierarchy which is exposed to the compiler. With software exposure of memory hierarchy, not only can replacement policies be tailored to the application, but pollution can be minimized or elim-inated, allowing programs to achieve memory reference locality with less local memory than would be needed by a cache. Additionally, prefetch latencies are fully exposed and can be hidden by the compiler, thereby improving overall performance. We have developed a technique we call Compiler Controlled Hierarchical Reuse Man-agement (or C-CHARM), implemented using the Stanford SUIF compiler system, which gathers compile time reuse information coupled with array dependence information, rewrites loops to use a truly minimal amount of local memory, and generates the necessary explicit data movement operations for the simple, software exposed hierarchical memory system of the M.I.T. RAW machine