alternatives to "noalias"?

[David Callahan]

In article <TMB.90Dec10035836 at bambleweenie57.ai.mit.edu> tmb at bambleweenie57.ai.mit.edu (Thomas M. Breuel) writes:
>Many optimizations that are possible because the compiler can assume
>that two different names don't refer to the same location can be
>expressed portably introducing explicit temporaries. 
...
>What I would like to ask: ignoring programming style, can you think of
>any optimizations that a FORTRAN compiler can carry out that cannot be
>expressed portably using temporaries and one or two compiler
>directives declaring absence of sequential dependencies in a loop
>body?

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by ``sequential dependencies'' but
I would note that restructuring compilers are not interested only 
in the absence of loop carried dependences (which inhibit simple
conversion of a loop to to parallel form) but how the dependences
which do exist can be used. Consider the loop:

	do i = 1,n 
	    do j = 1,m
		f(i,j) = f(i,j) + a(i,j)*f(i-1,j) + b(i,j)*f(i-2,j)

a simple second order recurence which has been vectorized in one
dimension. The output I would hope for from the current generation of 
research restructurers depends on the target machine. For a non-vector
machine, something like:

        do all j = 1,m
	    f2 = f(i-2,j)
	    f1 = f(i-1,j)
	    do i = 1,n 
		f0 = f(i,j)
		f(i,j) = f0 + a(i,j)*f1 + b(i,j)*f2
		f2 = f1 ; f1 = f0

where the assignments will later be eliminated by unrolling and
subsumption. On a vector machine with registers of length L, the j
loop is blocked and the f0,f1,f2 become vector temps. In addition to
the parallelism, the loop now has 1/3 fewer memory operations.

In this example, the critical information is that there is no alias
between f and any other variable, not that the j loop carries no
dependences.

-- 
David Callahan  (david at tera.com, david at june.cs.washington.edu,david at rice.edu)
Tera Computer Co. 	400 North 34th Street  		Seattle WA, 98103