CAREER: Scalable Compiler Optimizations for New Software

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

The goal of this research program is to develop compiler optimization technology for emerging software applications. Compared to the current state-of-the-practice, the new software applications will be written in type-safe languages (e.g., Java), will contain millions of lines of code, will often be built from components distributed across multiple machines, and will run on processors that will have multiple threads of control, but will take hundreds of cycles to access the main memory. Modern software will require modern optimizations that will need to be scalable in three ways: with the size of the program, with the number of distributed components, and with the growing memory latency. This research proposes to achieve scalability by exploiting radically novel forms of speculation, profiling, demand-driven analysis, run-time checks, and hardware support. To develop these technologies, three specific efforts will be undertaken: elimination of array-bounds checks, demand-driven pointer analysis, and prefetching for pointer-based data structures.