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Lightweight Feedback-Directed Cross-Module Optimization

Raksit Ashok
Proceedings of International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO), IEEE (2010)

Abstract

Cross-module inter-procedural compiler optimization (IPO) and Feedback-Directed Optimization (FDO) are two important compiler techniques delivering solid performance gains. The combination of IPO and FDO delivers peak performance, but also multiplies both techniques' usability problems. In this paper, we present LIPO, a novel static IPO framework, which integrates IPO and FDO. Compared to existing approaches, LIPO no longer requires writing of the compiler's intermediate representation, eliminates the link-time inter-procedural optimization phase entirely, and minimizes code re-generation overhead, thus improving scalability by an order of magnitude. Compared to an FDO baseline, and without further specific tuning, LIPO improves performance of SPEC2006 INT by 2.5%, and of SPEC2000 INT by 4.4%, with up to 23% for one benchmarks. We confirm our scalability results on a set of large industrial applications, demonstrating 2.9% performance improvements on average. Compile time overhead for full builds is less than 30%, incremental builds take a few seconds on average, and storage requirements increase by only 24%, all compared to the FDO baseline.

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