Automatic Vectorization for MATLAB

Dynamic array-based languages such as MATLAB provide a wide range of built-in operations which can be efficiently applied to all elements of an array. Historically, MATLAB and Octave programmers have been advised to manually transform loops to equivalent “vectorized” computations in order to maximize performance. In this paper we present the techniques and tools to perform automatic vectorization, including handling for loops with calls to user-defined functions. We evaluate the technique on 9 benchmarks using two interpreters and two JIT-based platforms and show that automatic vectorization is extremely effective for the interpreters on most benchmarks, and moderately effective on some benchmarks in the JIT context.