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Profiling feedback is an important technique used by developers for performance debugging, where it is usually used to pinpoint performance bottlenecks and also to find optimization opportunities. Assessing the validity and potential benefit of a program transformation requires accurate knowledge of the data flow and dependencies, which can be uncovered by profiling a particular execution of the program.In this work we develop poly-prof, an end-to-end infrastructure for dynamic binary analysis, which produces feedback about the potential to apply complex program rescheduling. Our tool can handle both inter-and intraprocedural aspects of the program in a unified way, thus providing interprocedural transformation feedback.

Growing interest in graphics processing units has brought renewed attention to the Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) execution model. SIMD machines give application developers tremendous computational power; however, programming them is still challenging. In particular, developers must deal with memory and control-flow divergences. These phenomena stem from a condition that we call data divergence, which occurs whenever two processing elements (PEs) see the same variable name holding different values. This article introduces divergence analysis, a static analysis that discovers data divergences. This analysis, currently deployed in an industrial quality compiler, is useful in several ways: it improves the translation of SIMD code to non-SIMD CPUs, it helps developers to manually improve their SIMD applications, and it also guides the automatic optimization of SIMD programs. We demonstrate this last point by introducing the notion of a divergence-aware register spiller. This spiller uses information from our analysis to either rematerialize or share common data between PEs. As a testimony of its effectiveness, we have tested it on a suite of 395 CUDA kernels from well-known benchmarks. The divergence-aware spiller produces GPU code that is 26.21% faster than the code produced by the register allocator used in the baseline compiler.

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SUMMARYThe increasing programmability and the high computational power of graphics processing units make them attractive to general purpose programming. However, taking full benefit of this execution environment is a challenging task. One of these challenges stems from divergences, a phenomenon that occurs when threads that execute in lock‐step are forced to take different program paths because of branches in the code. In face of divergences, some threads will have to wait, idly, while their diverging siblings execute. Optimizing the code to avoid divergences is difficult because this task demands a deep understanding of programs that might be large and convoluted. To facilitate the detection of divergences, this paper introduces the divergence map, a data structure that indicates the location and the volume of divergences in a program. We build this map via dynamic profiling techniques, which we have implemented on top of an open source Parallel Thread Execution compiler. To illustrate the importance of the divergence map, we have used it to pinpoint the core regions that must be optimized in well‐known public applications. By hand optimizing some applications, we have added 9–11% speedups onto kernels that have already gone through the sieve of many programmers. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.