• Paper: Portability of Optimizations from SC to TSO

    From John R Levine@johnl@taugh.com to comp.compilers on Sun May 4 17:42:30 2025
    From Newsgroup: comp.compilers

    This paper looks at ways to optimize parallel code that assumes Total
    Store Order rather than the stricter Sequential Consistency.

    Abstract

    It is well recognized that the safety of compiler optimizations is at risk
    in a concurrent context. Existing approaches primarily rely on
    context-free thread-local guarantees, and prohibit optimizations that
    introduce a data-race. However, compilers utilize global context-specific information, exposing safe optimizations that may violate such guarantees
    as well as introduce a race. Such optimizations need to individually be
    proven safe for each language model. An alternate approach to this would
    be proving them safe for an intuitive model (like interleaving semantics),
    and then determine their portability across other concurrent models. In
    this paper, we address this problem of porting across models of
    concurrency. We first identify a global guarantee on optimizations
    portable from Sequential Consistency (SC) to Total Store Order (TSO). Our guarantee is in the form of constraints specifying the syntactic changes
    an optimization must not incur. We then show these constraints correlate
    to prohibiting the introduction of triangular races, a subset of data-race relevant to TSO. We conclude by showing how such race inducing
    optimizations relate to porting across Strong Release Acquire (SRA), a
    known causally consistent memory model.

    https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.17646

    Regards,
    John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
    Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly
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