Static Analysis for Guarded Code

Abstract

Guarded(predicated) execution, as a new hardware feature, has been introduced into today’s high performance processors. Guarded execution can significantly improve the performance of programs with conditional branches, and meanwhile also poses new challenges for con- ventional program analysis techniques. In this paper, we propose a static semantics inference mechanism to capture the semantics information of guards in the context of guarded code. Based on the semantics informa- tion, we extend the conventional definitions regarding program analy- sis in guarded code, and develop the related guard-aware analysis tech- niques. These analyses include control flow analysis, data dependence analysis and data flow analysis as well.