Tiling Imperfectly-nested Loop Nests

Tiling is one of the more important transformations for enhancing locality of reference in programs. Intuitively, tiling a set of loops achieves the effect of interleaving iterations of these loops. Tiling of perfectly-nested loop nests (which are loop nests in which all assignment statements are contained in the innermost loop) is well understood. In practice, many loop nests are imperfectly-nested, so existing compilers use heuristics to try to find a sequence of transformations that convert such loop nests into perfectly-nested ones, but these heuristics do not always succeed. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to tiling imperfectly-nested loop nests. The key idea is to embed the iteration space of every statement in the imperfectly-nested loop nest into a special space called the product space which is tiled to produce the final code. We evaluate the effectiveness of this approach for dense numerical linear algebra benchmarks, relaxation codes, and the tomcatv code from the SPEC benchmarks. No other single approach in the literature can tile all these codes automatically.