Simplification of Array Access Patterns for Compiler Optimizations

Abstract

Existing array region representation techniques are sensitive to the complexity of array subscripts. In general, these techniques are very accurate and efficient for simple subscript expressions, but lose accuracy or require potentially expensive algorithms for complex subscripts. We found that in scientific applications, many access patterns are simple even when the subscript expressions are complex. In this work, we present a new, general array access representation and define operations for it. This allows us to aggregate and simplify the representation enough that precise region operations may be applied to enable compiler optimizations. Our experiments show that these techniques hold promise for speeding up applications.