Vector seeker: A tool for finding vector potential

G. Carl Evans, Seth Abraham, Bob Kuhn, David A. Padua

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

Abstract

The importance of vector instructions is growing in modern computers. Almost all architectures include some form of vector instructions and the tendency is for the size of the instructions to grow with newer designs. To take advantage of the performance that these systems offer, it is imperative that programs use these instructions, and yet they do not always do so. The tools to take advantage of these extensions require programmer assistance either by hand coding or providing hints to the compiler. We present Vector Seeker, a tool to help investigate vector parallelism in existing codes. Vector Seeker runs with the execution of a program to optimistically measure the vector parallelism that is present. Besides describing Vector Seeker, the paper also evaluates its effectiveness using two applications from Petascale Application Collaboration Teams (PACT) and eight applications from Media Bench II. These results are compared to known results from manual vectorization studies. Finally, we use the tool to automatically analyze codes from Numerical Recipes and TSVC and then compare the results with the automatic vectorization algorithms of Intel's ICC.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages41-48
Number of pages8
DOIs
StatePublished - 2014
Event2014 1st ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Programming Models for SIMD/Vector Processing, WPMVP 2014 - Co-located with PPoPP 2014 - Orlando, FL, United States
Duration: Feb 16 2014Feb 16 2014

Conference

Conference2014 1st ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Programming Models for SIMD/Vector Processing, WPMVP 2014 - Co-located with PPoPP 2014
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityOrlando, FL
Period2/16/142/16/14

Keywords

  • Compilers
  • Dynamic analysis
  • SIMD
  • Vectorization

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design
  • Software
  • Modeling and Simulation

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