A Scheduler-Sensitive Global Register Allocator

Author : Norris, Cindy; Pollock, Lori L.
Booktitle : Proceedings of the 1993 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
Date : Nov 1993
Publisher : ACM Press
Pages : 804 – 813
Keyword(s) : Register allocation
Document Type : In Conference Proceedings

Abstract :

Compile-time reordering of machine-level instructions has been very successful at achieving large increases in performance of programs on machines offering fine-grained parallelism. However, because of the interdependences between instruction scheduling and register allocation, it is not clear which of these two phases of the compiler should run first to generate the most efficient final code. In this paper, we describe our investigation into slight modifications to key phases of a successful global register allocator to create a scheduler-sensitive register allocator, which is then followed by an “off-the-shelf” instruction scheduler. Our experimental studies reveal that this approach achieves speed-ups comparable and increasingly better than previous cooperative approaches with an increasing number of available registers without the complexities of the previous approaches.

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