Automatic Intra-Register Vectorization for the Intel® Architecture

Recent extensions to the Intel^® Architecture feature the SIMD technique to enhance the performance of computational intensive applications that perform the same operation on different elements in a data set. To date, much of the code that exploits these extensions has been hand-coded. The task of the programmer is substantially simplified, however, if a compiler does this exploitation automatically. The high-performance Intel^® C++/Fortran compiler supports automatic translation of serial loops into code that uses the SIMD extensions to the Intel^® Architecture. This paper provides a detailed overview of the automatic vectorization methods used by this compiler together with an experimental validation of their effectiveness.