Combined Iterative and Model-Driven Optimization in an Automatic Parallelization Framework

Today's multi-core era places significant demands on an optimizing compiler, which must parallelize programs, exploit memory hierarchy, and leverage the ever-increasing SIMD capabilities of modern processors. Existing model-based heuristics for performance optimization used in compilers are limited in their ability to identify profitable parallelism/locality trade-offs and usually lead to sub-optimal performance. To address this problem, the authors distinguish optimizations for which effective model-based heuristics and profitability estimates exist, from optimizations that require empirical search to achieve good performance in a portable fashion.