A Cost-Effective Implementation of Multilevel Tiling

This paper presents a new cost-effective algorithm to compute exact loop bounds when multilevel tiling is applied to a loop nest having affine functions as bounds (nonrectangular loop nest). Traditionally, exact loop bounds computation has not been performed because its complexity is doubly exponential on the number of loops in the multilevel tiled code and, therefore, for certain classes of loops (i.e., nonrectangular loop nests), can be extremely time consuming. Although computation of exact loop bounds is not very important when tiling only for cache levels, it is critical when tiling includes the register level. This paper presents an efficient implementation of multilevel tiling that computes exact loop bounds and has a much lower complexity than conventional techniques. To achieve this lower complexity, our technique deals simultaneously with all levels to be tiled, rather than applying tiling level by level as is usually done. For loop nests having very simple affine functions as bounds, results show that our method is between 1.5 and 2.8 times faster than conventional techniques. For loop nests having not so simple bounds, we have measured speedups as high as 2,300. Additionally, our technique allows eliminating redundant bounds efficiently. Results show that eliminating redundant bounds in our method is between 2.2 and 11 times faster than in conventional techniques for typical linear algebra programs.