Load-Reuse Analysis: Design and Evaluation

Load-reuse analysis finds instructions that repeatedly access the same memory location. This location can be promoted to a register, eliminating redundant loads by reusing the results of prior memory accesses. This paper develops a load-reuse analysis and designs a method for evaluating its precision. In designing the analysis, we aspire for completeness—the goal of exposing all reuse that can be harvested by a subsequent program transformation. For register promotion, a suitable transformation is partial redundancy elimination (PRE). To approach the ideal goal of PRE-completeness, the load-reuse analysis is phrased as a dataflow problem on a program representation that is path-sensitive, as it detects reuse even when it originates in a different instruction along each control flow path. Furthermore, the analysis is comprehensive, as it treats scalar, array and pointer-based loads uniformly. In evaluating the analysis, we compare it with an ideal analysis. By observing the run-ti...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: PLDI
• Authors: Rastislav Bodík, Rajiv Gupta, Mary Lou Soffa
• Keywords: Ideal Analysis, Load-reuse Analysis, PLDI 1999, Programming Languages, Reuse