Software Support For Improving Locality in Scientific Codes

Abstract

We propose to develop and evaluate software support for improving locality for advanced scientific applications. We will investigate compiler and run-time techniques needed to achieve high performance on both sequential and parallel machines. We will focus on two areas. First, iterative PDE solvers for 3D partial differential equations have poor locality because accesses to nearby elements in higher-level dimensions are spread far apart in memory. Careful tiling and padding can frequently recapture such reuse. Second, computations on adaptive meshes and sparse matrices experience many cache misses because they access data in an irregular manner. Data layout and access order can be rearranged according to mesh connections or geometric location to improve locality, with cost models used to guide frequency of transformations for adaptive computations. 1 Introduction From astrophysics to biochemistry, scientists are increasingly using computers to conduct research and development. Fuelin...