SPO600 Vectorization Lab

This is a draft only!
It is still under construction and content may change. Do not rely on this information.

Purpose of this Lab
This lab is designed to explore single instruction/multiple data (SIMD) vectorization, and the auto-vectorization capabilities of the GCC compiler.

Lab 6

1. Write the shortest C program that can be vectorized by GCC.
2. Compile this program on aarchie.
3. Annotate the emitted code (i.e., obtain a dissassembly via objdump -d and add comments to the instructions in <main> explaining what the code does).
4. Write a blog post discussing your findings. Include:
   • The source code
   • The compiler command line used to build the code
   • Your annotated dissassembly listing
   • Your reflections on the experience and the results

Resources

• Auto-Vectorization in GCC - Main project page for the GCC auto-vectorizer.
• Auto-vectorization with gcc 4.7 - An excellent discussion of the capabilities and limitations of the GCC auto-vectorizer, intrinsics for providing hints to GCC, and other code pattern changes that can improve results. Note that there has been some improvement in the auto-vectorizer since this article was written. This article is strongly recommended.