Publications of Heiko Falk

[176953]
Title: WCET-aware Register Allocation based on Graph Coloring. <em>In Proceedings of the 46th Design Automation Conference (DAC)</em>
Written by: Heiko Falk
in: July (2009).
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on pages: 726-731
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Series: 20090730-dac-falk.pdf
Address: San Francisco / USA
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ISBN: 10.1145/1629911.1630100
how published: 09-55 Falk09c DAC
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Note: hfalk, ESD, WCC

Abstract: Current compilers lack precise timing models guiding their built-in optimizations. Hence, compilers apply ad-hoc heuristics during optimization to improve code quality. One of the most important optimizations is register allocation. Many compilers heuristically decide when and where to spill a register to memory, without having a clear understanding of the impact of such spill code on a program's run time.<br /> This paper extends a graph coloring register allocator such that it uses precise worst-case execution time (WCET) models. Using this WCET timing data, the compiler tries to avoid spill code generation along the critical path defining a program’s WCET. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first one to present a WCET-aware register allocator. Our results underline the effectiveness of the proposed techniques. For a total of 46 realistic benchmarks, we reduced WCETs by 31.2% on average. Additionally, the runtimes of our WCET-aware register allocator still remain acceptable.