SRF Coloring: Stream Register File Allocation via Graph Coloring

Stream Register File (SRF) is a large on-chip memoryof the stream processor and its efficient management is essential forgood performance. Current stream programming languages expose themanagement of SRF to the programmer, incurring heavy burden onthe programmer and bringing difficulties to inheriting the legacy codes.SF95 is the language developed for FT64 which is the first 64-bitstream processor designed for scientific applications. SF95 concealsSRF from the programmer and leaves the management of SRF to itscompiler. In this paper, we present a compiler approach named SRFColoring to manage SRF automatically. The novelties of this paperare: first, it is the first time to use the graph coloring-basedalgorithm for the SRF management; second, an algorithm framework forSRF Coloring that is well suited to the FT64 architecture is proposed--- this framework is based on a well-understood graph coloring algorithmfor register allocation, together with some modifications to deal withthe unusual aspects of SRF problem; third, the SRF Coloringalgorithm is implemented in SF95Compiler, a compiler designed for FT64and SF95. The experimental results show that our approach represents apractical and promising solution to SRF allocation.