Improving Loop Dependence Analysis

Programmers can no longer depend on new processors to have significantly improved single-thread performance. Instead, gains have to come from other sources such as the compiler and its optimization passes. Advanced passes make use of information on the dependencies related to loops. We improve the quality of that information by reusing the information given by the programmer for parallelization. We have implemented a prototype based on GCC into which we also add a new optimization pass. Our approach improves the amount of correctly classified dependencies resulting in 46% average improvement in single-thread performance for kernel benchmarks compared to GCC 6.1.