A Case Study of User-Defined Code Transformations for Data Layout Optimizations

This paper reports a case study of using the Xevolver code transformation framework for data layout optimizations of high-performance computing (HPC) applications. Due to the variety of data structures used in individual applications, a code transformation rule for data layout optimizations is generally specific to a particular application. Since the Xevolver framework enables users to define their own code transformations, a custom code transformation can be defined so that a specific data representation in an existing code can mechanically and consistently be translated to another one. Our evaluation results clearly demonstrate that such a code transformation is effective to improve memory access efficiency and hence the performance of an HPC application without overcomplicating the code.