A Compiler Analysis of Interprocedural Data Communication

This paper presents a compiler analysis for data communication for the purpose of transforming ordinary programs into ones that run on distributed systems. Such transformations have been used for process migration and computation offloading to improve the performance of mobile computing devices. In a client-server distributed environment, the efficiency of an application can be improved by careful partitioning of tasks between the server and the client. Optimal task partitioning depends on the tradeoff between the computation workload and the communication cost. Our compiler analysis, assisted by a minimum set of user assertions, estimates the amount of data communication between procedures. The paper also presents experimental results based on an implementation in the GCC compiler. The static estimates for several multimedia programs are compared against dynamic measurement performed using Shade, a SUN Microsystem's instruction-level simulator. The results show a high precision of the static analysis for most pairs of the procedures.