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Connection Analysis: A Practical Interprocedural Heap Analysis for C

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Abstract

This paper presents a practical heap analysis technique, connection analysis, that can be used to disambiguate heap accesses in C programs. The technique is designed for analyzing programs that allocate many disjoint objects in the heap such as dynamically-allocated arrays in scientific programs. The method statically estimates connection matrices which encode the connection relationships between all heap-directed pointers at each program point. The results of the analysis can be used by parallelizing compilers to determine when two heap-allocated objects are guaranteed to be disjoint, and thus can be used to improve array dependence and interference analysis. The method has been implemented as a context-sensitive interprocedural analysis in the McCAT optimizing/parallelizing C compiler. Experimental results are given to compare the accuracy of connection analysis versus a conservative estimate based on points-to analysis.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science, McGill University, Montréal, Canada, H3A 2A7

    Rakesh Ghiya & Laurie J. Hendren

Authors
  1. Rakesh Ghiya
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  2. Laurie J. Hendren
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Correspondence to Rakesh Ghiya.

Additional information

This work supported by NSERC, FCAR, and the EPPP project (financed by Industry Canada, Alex Parallel Computers, Digital Equipment Canada, IBM Canada and the Centre de recherche informatique de Montréal).

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Ghiya, R., Hendren, L.J. Connection Analysis: A Practical Interprocedural Heap Analysis for C. Int J Parallel Prog 24, 547–578 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03356759

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