llvm dev - Jan 2013 - [LLVMdev] parallel loop awareness to the LoopVectorizer

About these disclaimers associated with ivdep and such...
You guys are overthinking it. They're just saying you cannot force the
compiler to vectorize or parallelize a loop that it knows (can prove!) is
not a parallel loop. They are not obliging the compiler to do dependence
analysis or alias analysis or anything.

For example

len = 0;
while (A[i]) {
  i++;
  len++;
}


Assert all you want; the compiler won't parallelize the loop, and a good
thing too.

Preston



> > From: "Pekka Jääskeläinen" <pekka.jaaskelainen at
tut.fi>
> > To: "Hal Finkel" <hfinkel at anl.gov>
> > Cc: "Nadav Rotem" <nrotem at apple.com>, "LLVM
Developers Mailing List" <
> llvmdev at cs.uiuc.edu>
> > Sent: Monday, January 28, 2013 11:36:21 AM
> > Subject: Re: [LLVMdev] [PATCH] parallel loop awareness to the
> LoopVectorizer
> >
> > On 01/28/2013 06:51 PM, Hal Finkel wrote:
> > > Is this sufficient to implement #pragma ivdep in clang?
> >
> > I'm not completely sure of this:
> >
> > "Note: The proven dependencies that prevent vectorization are not
> > ignored,
> > only assumed dependencies are ignored."
> >
> >
>
http://software.intel.com/sites/products/documentation/studio/composer/en-us/2011Update/compiler_c/cref_cls/common/cppref_pragma_ivdep.htm
> >
> > Thus, there's a slight difference. It cannot be used to disable
> > dependency
> > checking altogether (and just blame a sloppy programmer if there
> > actually
> > are dependencies), but it just converts the "unknown alias"
to "no
> > alias".
> > If there's a "yes" from the analyzer it still prevents
the
> > vectorization.
> > So, sort of a softened programmer-friendlier version of the
> > semantics.
> >
> > The vagueness comes from that it depends on the intelligence
> > of the dependency analysis implementation whether a dependency can be
> > "proven"
> > or not, doesn't it? Thus, #pragma ivdep with a non-existing
> > loop dependence analyzer is equivalent to the semantics of the
> > proposed
> > metadata.
>
> And the user has no way of knowing which dependencies are proven and which
> are assumed, right? It seems like the user just needs to assume that
> nothing is proven ;) Nevertheless, based on this, we probably do need
> something with slightly weaker semantics for ivdep.
>
> >
> > Also, it's a bit unclear what is the real difference to the
#pragma
> > parallel:
> >
>
http://software.intel.com/sites/products/documentation/studio/composer/en-us/2011Update/compiler_c/cref_cls/common/cppref_pragma_parallel.htm
> >
> > It similarly states: "However, if dependencies are proven, they
are
> > not
> > ignored." So conversely, if the compiler cannot prove a
dependency
> > for
> > some reason, they *are* ignored?
>
> Interesting.
>
> >
> > OpenMP's 'omp for', on the other hand, can be used to mark
a truly
> > parallel
> > loop where this metadata could be used if one wants to parallelize
> > those
> > loops using a finer-granularity mechanism than threads.
>
> Agreed; we should make sure to incorporate this into the upcoming OpenMP
> support. The loops will be outlined, but the outlined pieces can then be
> marked with this 'parallel' metadata.
>
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