Locality Transformations for Nested Recursive Iteration Spaces

• Published in: Computer architecture news 2017-05, Vol.45 (1), p.281-295
• Main Authors: Sundararajah, Kirshanthan, Sakka, Laith, Kulkarni, Milind
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0163-5964
• DOI: 10.1145/3093337.3037720

There has been a significant amount of effort invested in designing scheduling transformations such as loop tiling and loop fusion that rearrange the execution of dynamic instances of loop nests to place operations that access the same data close together temporally. In recent years, there has been interest in designing similar transformations that operate on recursive programs, but until now these transformations have only considered simple scenarios: multiple recursions to be fused, or a recursion nested inside a simple loop. This paper develops the first set of scheduling transformations for nested recursions: recursive methods that call other recursive methods. These are the recursive analog to nested loops. We present a transformation called recursion twisting that automatically improves locality at all levels of the memory hierarchy, and show that this transformation can yield substantial performance improvements across several benchmarks that exhibit nested recursion.