HERCULES: Strong Patterns towards More Intelligent Predictive Modeling

Recent work has shown that program analysis techniques to select meaningful code features of programs are important in the task of deciding the best compiler optimizations. Although, there are many successful state-of-the-art program analysis techniques, they often do not provide a simple method to extract the most expressive information about loops, especially when a target program is computationally intensive with complex loops and data dependencies. In this paper, we introduce a static technique to characterize a program using a pattern-driven system named HERCULES. This characterization technique not only helps a user to understand programs by searching pattern-of-interests, but also can be used for a predictive model that effectively selects the proper compiler optimizations. We formulated 35 loop patterns, then evaluated our characterization technique by comparing the predictive models constructed using HERCULES to three other state-of-the-art characterization methods. We show that our models outperform three state-of-the-art program characterization techniques on two multicore systems in selecting the best optimization combination from a given loop transformation space. We achieved up to 67% of the best possible speedup achievable with the optimization search space we evaluated.