Compile Time Partitioning of Nested Loop Iteration Spaces with Non-uniform Dependences*

In this paper we address the problem of partitioning nested loops with non-uniform (irregular) dependence vectors. Parallelizing and partitioning of nested loops requires efficient inter-iteration dependence analysis. Although many methods exist for nested loop partitioning, most of these perform poorly when parallelizing nested loops with irregular dependences. Unlike the case of nested loops with uniform dependences these will have a complicated dependence pattern which forms a non-uniform dependence vector set. We apply the results of classical convex theory and principles of linear programming to iteration spaces and show the correspondence between minimum dependence distance computation and iteration space tiling. Cross-iteration dependences are analyzed by forming an Integer Dependence Convex Hull (IDCH). Every integer point in this IDCH corresponds to a dependence vector in the iteration space of the nested loops. A simple way to compute minimum dependence distances from the dependence distance vectors of the extreme points of the IDCH is presented. Using these minimum dependence distances the iteration space can be tiled. Iterations within a tile can be executed in parallel and the different tiles can then be executed with proper synchronization. We demonstrate that our technique gives much better speedup and extracts more parallelism than the existing techniques.