A Practical Improvement to the Partial Redundancy Elimination in SSA Form

Abstract

Partial redundancy elimination (PRE) is an interesting compiler optimization because of its effectiveness and generality. Among many PRE algorithms, the one in static single assignment form (SSAPRE) has benefits over other bit-vector-based PRE algorithms. It preserves the properties of the SSA form after PRE and exploits the sparsity of the SSA form, resulting in reduced analysis and optimization time. This paper presents a practical improvement of the SSAPRE algorithm that further reduces the analysis and optimization time. The underlying idea is removing unnecessary Φ’s during the Φ-Insertion phase that is the first step of SSAPRE. We classify the expressions into three categories: confined expressions, local expressions, and the others. We show that unnecessary Φ’s for confined and local expressions can be easily detected and removed. We implement our locality-based SSAPRE algorithm in a C compiler and evaluate its effectiveness with 20 applications from SPEC benchmark suites. In our measurements, on average 91% of Φ’s identified by the original demand-driven SSAPRE algorithm are unnecessary for PRE. Pruning these unnecessary Φ’s in the Φ-Insertion phase makes our locality-based SSAPRE algorithm 1.8 times faster, on average, than the original SSAPRE algorithm.