Rapidly Selecting Good Compiler Optimizations using Performance Counters

Applying the right compiler optimizations to a particular program can have a significant impact on program performance. Due to the non-linear interaction of compiler optimizations, however, determining the best setting is nontrivial. There have been several proposed techniques that search the space of compiler options to find good solutions; however such approaches can be expensive. This paper proposes a different approach using performance counters as a means of determining good compiler optimization settings. This is achieved by learning a model off-line which can then be used to determine good settings for any new program. We show that such an approach outperforms the state-ofthe-art and is two orders of magnitude faster on average. Furthermore, we show that our performance counter-based approach outperforms techniques based on static code features. Using our technique we achieve a 17% improvement over the highest optimization setting of the commercial PathScale EKOPath 2.3.1 opt...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: CGO
• Authors: John Cavazos, Grigori Fursin, Felix V. Agakov, Edwin V. Bonilla, Michael F. P. O'Boyle, Olivier Temam
• Keywords: Approach Outperforms, CGO 2007, Compiler Optimization, Right Compiler Optimizations, Software Engineering