Combining Run-Time Checks and Compile-Time Analysis to Improve Control Flow Auto-Vectorization
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) instructions apply the same operation to multiple elements simultaneously. Compilers transform codes to exploit SIMD instructions through auto-vectorization. Control flow can lead to challenges for auto-vectorization tools because compilers conservatively assume branches are divergent. However, it is common that all SIMD lanes follow the same control-path at run-time, a property we call dynamic uniformity. In this paper, we present VecRC (an auto-vectorizer with run-time checks), a novel compile-time technique that uses run-time checks to test for dynamically uniform control flows. Under the assumption of dynamic uniformity, we perform several compile-time analyses that improve control flow auto-vectorization vs state-of-the-art approaches. VecRC leverages dynamic uniformity to vectorize loops with control-dependent loop-carried dependences. Existing strategies use speculation to optimistically execute vector code, and must correct any incorrect computation due to violated run-time assumptions. VecRC performs compile-time analysis based on uniformity to support such dependences without the overhead of speculation. We propose a probability-based cost model to predict the profitability of run-time checks to eliminate the need for specialized profiling or expensive auto-tuning required in existing methods. VecRC is evaluated in LLVM on a diverse range of benchmarks including SPEC2017, NPB, Parboil, TSVC, and Rodinia on Intel Skylake and IBM Power 9 architectures. On the Skylake architecture, geometric mean speedups of 1.31x, 1.20x, 1.19x, and 1.06x over Region Vectorizer, GCC, Clang, and ICC are obtained with VecRC on real benchmark code.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it