Exploring hybrid memory for GPU energy efficiency through software-hardware co-design

Abstract

Precise pointer analysis is a problem of interest to both the compiler and the program verification community. Flowsensitivity is an important dimension of pointer analysis that affects the precision of the final result computed. Scaling flowsensitive pointer analysis to millions of lines of code is a major challenge.Recently, staged flow-sensitive pointer analysis has been proposed, which exploits a sparse representation of program code created by staged analysis. In this paper we formulate the staged flow-sensitive pointer analysis as a graph-rewriting problem. Graph-rewriting has already been used for flow-insensitive analysis. However, formulating flow-sensitive pointer analysis as a graph-rewriting problem adds additional challenges due to the nature of flow-sensitivity.We implement our parallel algorithm using Intel Threading Building Blocks and demonstrate considerable scaling (upto 2.6x) for 8 threads on a set of 10 benchmarks. Compared to the sequential implementation of staged flow-sensitive analysis, a single threaded execution of our implementation performs better in 8 of the benchmarks.