Feasibility of Optimizations Requiring Bounded Treewidth in a Data Flow Centric Intermediate Representation

Abstract

Data flow analyses are instrumental to effective compiler optimizations, and are typically implemented by extracting implicit data flow information from traversals of a control flow graph intermediate representation. The Regionalized Value State Dependence Graph is an alternative intermediate representation, which represents a program in terms of its data flow dependencies, leaving control flow implicit. Several analyses that enable compiler optimizations reduce to NP-Complete graph problems in general, but admit linear time solutions if the graph’s treewidth is limited. In this paper, we investigate the treewidth of application benchmarks and synthetic programs, in order to identify program features which cause the treewidth of its data flow graph to increase, and assess how they may appear in practical software. We find that increasing numbers of live variables cause unbounded growth in data flow graph treewidth, but this can ordinarily be remedied by modular program design, and monolithic programs that exceed a given bound can be efficiently detected using an approximate treewidth heuristic.