Work

Minotaur: A SIMD-Oriented Synthesizing Superoptimizer

Year: 2024

Type: article

Abstract: A superoptimizing compiler—one that performs a meaningful search of the program space as part of the optimization process—can find optimization opportunities that are missed by even the best existing optimizing compilers. We created Minotaur: a superoptimizer for LLVM that uses program synthesis to improve its code generation, focusing on integer and floating-point SIMD code. On an Intel Cascade Lake processor, Minotaur achieves an average speedup of 7.3% on the GNU Multiple Precision library (GMP)’s benchmark suite, with a maximum speedup of 13%. On SPEC CPU 2017, our superoptimizer produces an average speedup of 1.5%, with a maximum speedup of 4.5% for 638.imagick. Every optimization produced by Minotaur has been formally verified, and several optimizations that it has discovered have been implemented in LLVM as a result of our work.

Source: Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages

DOI: 10.1145/3689766

Authors: Zhengyang Liu, Stefan Mada, John Regehr

Institution: University of Utah

Language: English

Topic: Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques

Subfield: Hardware and Architecture

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: diamond

Funder: National Science Foundation

Award: SHF: Medium: Formal Methods as a First-Class Citizen of a Mainstream Compiler Framework