Learning to Schedule Straight-Line Code

Program execution speed on modern computers is sensitive, by a factor of two or more, to the order in which instructions are presented to the processor. To realize potential execution efficiency, an optimizing compiler must employ a heuristic algorithm for instruction scheduling. Such algorithms are painstakingly hand-crafted, which is expensive and time-consuming. We show how to cast the instruction scheduling problem as a learning task, obtaining the heuristic scheduling algorithm automatically. Our focus is the narrower problem of scheduling straight-line code (also called basic blocks of instructions). Our empirical results show that just a few features are adequate for quite good performance at this task for a real modern processor, and that any of several supervised learning methods perform nearly optimally with respect to the features used.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: NIPS
• Authors: J. Eliot B. Moss, Paul E. Utgoff, John Cavazos, Doina Precup, Darko Stefanovic, Carla E. Brodley, David Scheeff
• Keywords: Heuristic Scheduling Algorithm, Instruction Scheduling, Instruction Scheduling Problem, NIPS 1997, NIPS 2007