Loop sectioning

Loop sectioning is a program optimization technique that aims to improve the efficiency of vectorization by splitting the loop execution into several sections.

Instead of iterating from 0 to N, the loop iterates in sections which are smaller in size, e.g. 0 to S, from S to 2S - 1, etc.

There are two distinct use cases for loop sectioning:

• Enabling vectorization of for loops with break and some uncountable loops. These loops typically cannot be vectorized, but loop sectioning makes this possible.

• Improving the locality of reference after loop fission. In this case, loop sectioning can be considered as a special subtype of loop tiling, but the goal of optimization is different.

Vectorizing loops with break statements in the loop body

To illustrate loop sectioning, let's have a look at the following example:

int index;
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
  if (a[i] == 0) {
    index = i;
    break;
  }
}

This is a search loop which searches for the first element of the array a with value 0. These loops typically cannot be vectorized.

By applying loop sectioning, we get the following loop:

#define SECTION_SIZE 8

int index;
for (int ii = 0; ii < n; ii += SECTION_SIZE) {
  int found_count = 0;
  for (int i = ii; i < (ii + SECTION_SIZE); i++) {
    if (a[i] == 0) {
      found_count++;
    }
  }

  if (found_count > 0) {
    for (int i = ii; i < (ii + SECTION_SIZE); i++) {
      if (a[i] == 0) {
        index = i;
        goto exit;
      }
    }
  }
}

exit:
// ...

In the original loop, we process values in batches of 1: one batch equals one element. After loop sectioning, we process values in batches of SECTION_SIZE. The loop on lines 6-10 just notes that there is an element which has the desired property (is 0), but doesn't break out of the loop. This loop is vectorizable.

When the element with a desired property is found (line 12), we rerun the loop again to find the exact element. This loop cannot be vectorized because of the goto statement in the loop body, but it is executed only once and has a short trip count, so it doesn't matter.

Mitigating the effect of repeated access to the same data

Take a look at the example loop produced by loop fission:

double *tmp = malloc(n * sizeof(double));

for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
  tmp[i] = expensive_computation();
}

int j = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
  if (tmp[i] > 0) {
    b[j] = tmp[i];
    j++;
  }
}

free(tmp);

There are two loops, and both of them access the same array tmp. The first loop writes to tmp and the second reads from it.

If the size of the array tmp is small, then when the first loop finishes, the values of the array tmp will most likely still be in the data cache and the second loop can process them faster.

If the size of the array tmp is however larger than the size of the data caches, when the first loop has finished, all the data that the second loop needs has already been evicted from the cache. To remedy this, we can perform loop sectioning. The loop sectioning looks like this:

#define SECTION_SIZE 512

double *tmp = malloc(n * sizeof(double));
int j = 0;

for (int ii = 0; ii < n; ii += SECTION_SIZE) {
  for (int i = ii; i < MIN(ii + SECTION_SIZE, n); i++) {
    tmp[i] = expensive_computation();
  }

  for (int i = ii; i < MIN(ii + SECTION_SIZE, n); i++) {
    if (tmp[i] > 0) {
      b[j] = tmp[i];
      j++;
    }
  }
}

free(tmp);

Instead of running the first loop from 0 to n (where n can be large), and then running the second loop from 0 to n, the first loop and second loop take turns in executing: the first loop runs from 0 to SECTION_SIZE - 1 followed by the second loop, then the first loop runs from SECTION_SIZE to 2 * SECTION_SIZE - 1, followed by the second loop, etc.

When running like this, the values of the array tmp are still in the data cache after the first loop is done, so the second loop can reuse the same data from the data cache instead of loading it from the memory.