Construction of speculative optimization algorithms

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In modern processors, instructions to perform operations are often produced before it becomes known that this is required. Such an expedient, which is called speculative execution, helps to reveal parallelism at the instruction level. In the EPIC architectures, the speculative execution is completely controlled by the compiler, which makes it possible to avoid using complex hardware mechanisms for supporting speculative instruction production. Moreover, the idea of the speculative execution can be used by the compiler in machine-independent optimizations. The paper describes a scheme of construction of the speculative optimization that is based on the selection of properties of the control flow and data flow that are important from the optimization standpoint and on the estimation of the probabilities of their fulfillment. The probabilities found are used for searching and constructing advantageous speculative and bookkeeping transformations. For optimizations that include only speculative movements of instructions upwards along the control flow graph, on the basis of the suggested scheme, a method has been developed that includes algorithms for finding probabilities of data and control dependences, for estimating benefit of speculative movements, and for constructing a recovery code. On the basis of this method, an algorithm for the speculative scheduling of instructions for the Intel Itanium architecture has been developed and implemented. Specific features of its implementation and experimental results are described.