On the Transformation Optimization for Stencil Computation

Abstract

Stencil computation optimizations have been investigated quite a lot, and various approaches have been proposed. Loop transformation is a vital kind of optimization in modern production compilers and has proved successful employment within compilers. In this paper, we combine the two aspects to study the potential benefits some common transformation recipes may have for stencils. The recipes consist of loop unrolling, loop fusion, address precalculation, redundancy elimination, instruction reordering, load balance, and a forward and backward update algorithm named semi-stencil. Experimental evaluations of diverse stencil kernels, including 1D, 2D, and 3D computation patterns, on two typical ARM and Intel platforms, demonstrate the respective effects of the transformation recipes. An average speedup of 1.65× is obtained, and the best is 1.88× for the single transformation recipes we analyze. The compound recipes demonstrate a maximum speedup of 1.92×.