Assessing the State of Autovectorization Support based on SVE

So-called SIMD instructions, which trigger operations that process in each clock cycle a data tuple, have become widespread in modern processor architectures. In particular, processors for high-performance computing (HPC) systems rely on this additional level of parallelism to reach a high throughput of arithmetic operations. Leveraging these SIMD instructions can still be challenging for application software developers. This challenge has become simpler due to a compiler technique called auto-vectorization. In this paper, we explore the current state of auto-vectorization capabilities using state-of-the-art compilers using a recent extension of the Arm instruction set architecture, called SVE. We measure the performance gains on a recent processor architecture supporting SVE, namely the Fujitsu A64FX processor.