On Instruction Organization

To attain high program performance, a developer must be conscious to the many intricacies of hardware and organize their code accordingly. This however, is not an easy task. Often the hardware is unknown to developers, or, if it is known, it is difficult to control or account for. Developers struggle with this challenge by using hardware conscious algorithms, specialized programming languages, or doing manual low-level optimizations.

We investigate the concept of instruction organization at a more general level. In particular, we investigate if a program, running on existing hardware, can be automatically reorganized according to a chosen organization metric. Further, if the reorganization can be done automatically, a program can then be reorganized during execution to adapt to changes in system resources, and changing execution and data access patterns.

We use data locality as an organization metric with the goal of reducing data access latency and improving program performance.