Section: New Results

Static Versus Dynamic Memory Allocation

Participant : Vincent Loechner.

Vincent Loechner and Toufik Baroudi (PhD student, Univ. Batna, Algeria) compared the performance of linear algebra kernels using different array allocation modes: as static declared arrays or as dynamically allocated arrays of pointers. They studied the possible reasons of the difference in performance of parallelized or sequential linear algebra kernels on two different architectures: an AMD (Magny-Cours) and an Intel Xeon (Haswell-EP). Static or dynamic memory allocation has an impact on performance in many cases. Both the processor architecture and the compiler can provoke significant and sometimes surprising variations in the number of cache misses and vectorization opportunities taken by the compiler.

This work has been accepted for presentation at the International Workshop on Polyhedral Compilation Techniques (IMPACT 2020), in conjunction with HiPEAC '20 (Jan. 2020, Bologna, Italy).