An Interprocedural Framework for Placement of Asychronous I/O Operations

Abstract

Overlapping memory accesses with computations is a standard technique for improving performance on modern architectures, which have deep memory hierarchies. In this paper, we present a compiler technique for overlapping accesses to secondary memory (disks) with computation. We have developed an Interprocedural Balanced Code Placement (IBCP) framework, which performs analysis on arbitrary recursive procedures and arbitrary control flow and replaces synchronous I/O operations with a balanced pair of asynchronous operations. We demonstrate how this analysis is useful for applications which perform frequent and large accesses to secondary memory, including applications which snapshot or checkpoint their computations or out-of-core applications. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-95-114)