More General Optimal Offset Assignment

Abstract

This manuscript presents exact approaches to the general offset assignment problem arising in the address code generation phase of compilers for application-specific processors. First, integer programming models for architecture-dependent and theoretically motivated special cases of the problem are established. Then, these models are extended to provide the first widely applicable formulations for the most general problem setting, supporting processors with several address registers and complex addressing capabilities. Existing heuristics are similarly extended and practical applicability of the proposed methods is demonstrated by experimental evaluation using an established and large benchmark set. The experiments allow us to study the impact of exploiting more complex memory addressing capabilities on the address computation costs of real-world programs. We also show how to integrate operand reordering techniques for commutative instructions into existing solution approaches.