Exploiting Vector Processing in Dynamic Binary Translation

Abstract

Auto vectorization techniques have been adopted by compilers to exploit data-level parallelism in parallel processing for decades. However, since processor architectures have kept enhancing with new features to improve vector/SIMD performance, legacy application binaries failed to fully exploit new vector/SIMD capabilities in modern architectures. For example, legacy ARMv7 binaries cannot benefit from ARMv8 SIMD double precision capability, and legacy x86 binaries cannot enjoy the power of AVX-512 extensions. In this paper, we study the fundamental issues involved in cross-ISA Dynamic Binary Translation (DBT) to convert non-vectorized loops to vector/SIMD forms to achieve greater computation throughput available in newer processor architectures. The key idea is to recover critical loop information from those application binaries in order to carry out vectorization at runtime. Experiment results show that our approach achieves an average speedup of 1.42x compared to ARMv7 native run across various benchmarks in an ARMv7-to-ARMv8 dynamic binary translation system.