Generating efficient tiled code for distributed memory machines

Tiling can improve the performance of nested loops on distributed memory machines by exploiting coarse-grain parallelism and reducing communication overhead and frequency. Tiling calls for a compilation approach that performs first computation distribution and then data distribution, both possibly on a skewed iteration space. This paper presents a suite of compiler techniques for generating efficient SPMD programs to execute rectangularly tiled iteration spaces on distributed memory machines. The following issues are addressed: computation and data distribution, message-passing code generation, memory management and optimisations. and global to local address translation. Methods are developed for partitioning arbitrary iteration spaces a:nd skewed data spaces. Techniques for generating efficient message-passing code for both arbitrary and rectangular iteration spaces are presented. A storage scheme for managing both local and nonlocal references is developed, which leads to the SPMD code with high locality of references. Two memory optimisations are given to reduce the amount of memory usage for skewed iteration spaces and expanded arrays, respectively. The proposed compiler techniques are illustrated using a simple running example and finally analysed and evaluated based on experimental results on a Fujitsu AP1000 consisting of 128 processors. (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science B.V, All rights reserved.