On the sequential nature of interprocedural program-analysis problems

Abstract

In this paper, we study two interprocedural program-analysis problems--interprocedural slicing and interprocedural dataflow analysis-- and present the following results: These results provide evidence that there do not exist fast (N?-class) parallel algorithms for interprocedural slicing and precise interprocedural dataflow analysis (unlessP =N?). That is, it is unlikely that there are algorithms for interprocedural slicing and precise interprocedural dataflow analysis for which the number of processors is bounded by a polynomial in the size of the input, and whose running time is bounded by a polynomial in the logarithm of the size of the input. This suggests that there are limitations on the ability to use parallelism to overcome compiler bottlenecks due to expensive interprocedural-analysis computations.