Abstract

The problem of modeling memory locality of applications to guide compiler optimizations in a systematic manner is an important unsolved problem, made even more significant with the advent of multi-core and many-core architectures. In the first part of the talk I will describe an approach based on a novel source-level metric, called static reuse distance, to model the memory behavior of applications written in MATLAB. We use MATLAB as a representative language that lets end-users express their algorithms precisely, but at a relatively high level. MATLAB’s “high-level” characteristics allow the static analysis to focus on large objects, such as arrays, without losing accuracy due to processor-specific layout of scalar values in memory.

In the second part of the talk I will describe a model to predict the performance of MATLAB programs on GPUs and use it for automatic partitioning of MATLAB programs across CPUs and GPUs, in order to maximize parallelism. We use a heuristic algorithm to solve the hard partitioning problem and show experimental results to demonstrate its effectiveness.

Finally, I will outline some ideas that bring the problems of locality and parallelization together.