Outer-loop vectorization
Dorit Nuzman, Ayal Zaks · 2008
Vectorization has been an important method of using data-level parallelism to accelerate scientific workloads on vector machines such as Cray for the past three decades. In the last decade it has also proven useful for accelerating multi-media and embedded applications on short SIMD architectures such as MMX, SSE and AltiVec. Most of the focus has been directed at innermost loops, effectively executing their iterations concurrently as much as possible. Outer loop vectorization refers to vectorizing a level of a loop nest other than the innermost, which can be beneficial if the outer loop exhibits greater data-level parallelism and locality than the innermost loop. Outer loop vectorization has traditionally been performed by interchanging an outer-loop with the innermost loop, followed by vectorizing it at the innermost position. A more direct unroll-and-jam approach can be used to vectorize an outer-loop without involving loop interchange, which can be especially suitable for short SIMD architectures.