Compiling for an indirect vector register architecture

The iVMX architecture contains a novel vector register file of up to 4096 vector registers accessed indirectly via a mapping mechanism, providing compatibility with the VMX architecture, and potential for dramatic performance benefits [7]. The large number of vector registers and the unique indirection mechanism pose compilation challenges to be used efficiently: the indirection mechanism emphasizes spatial locality of registers and interaction among destination and source operands during register allocation, and the many vector registers call for aggressive automatic vectorization.

This work is a first step in addressing the compilability of iVMX, following the presentation and validation of its architectural aspects [7]. In this paper we present several compilation approaches to deal with the mapping mechanism and an outer-loop vectorization transformation developed to promote the use of many vector registers. We modified an existing register allocator to target all available registers and added a post-pass to rename live-ranges considering spatial locality and interaction among operand types. An FIR filter is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the techniques developed compared to a version hand-optimized for iVMX. Initial results show that we can reduce the overhead of map management down to 29% of the total instruction count, compared to 22% obtained manually, and compared to 49% obtained using a naive scheme, while outperforming an equivalent VMX implementation by a factor of 2.