Learning to Schedule Straight-Line Code

Program execution speed on modem computers is sensitive, by a factor of two or more, to the order in which instructions are presented to the proces(cid: 173) sor. To realize potential execution efficiency, an optimizing compiler must employ a heuristic algorithm for instruction scheduling. Such algorithms are painstakingly hand-crafted, which is expensive and time-consuming. We show how to cast the instruction scheduling problem as a learning task, ob(cid: 173) taining the heuristic scheduling algorithm automatically. Our focus is the narrower problem of scheduling straight-line code (also called basic blocks of instructions). Our empirical results show that just a few features are ad(cid: 173) equate for quite good performance at this task for a real modem processor, and that any of several supervised learning methods perform nearly opti(cid: 173) mally with respect to the features used.

Authors

• J. Moss
• Paul Utgoff
• John Cavazos
• Doina Precup McGill University Mila
• Darko Stefanovic
• Carla Brodley Tufts University
• David Scheeff

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