What program was used to create the dependency diagrams? And is there some more general introduction for using this sort of dependency analysis for low level optimizations?
As I mention in the article, dependency analysis has, IMO, not received the widespread attention it should. I like Fabian Giesen's article if you want an introduction.
https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2018/03/05/a-whirlwind-introdu...
One particularly interesting example in this context is OSACA (Open Source Architecture Code Analyzer), https://github.com/RRZE-HPC/osaca
The related publications explain the approach used to model and perform critical path analysis relevant for the modern superscalar out-of-order processors:
- Automatic Throughput and Critical Path Analysis of x86 and ARM Assembly Kernels (2019): https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.00214
- Cross-Architecture Automatic Critical Path Detection For In-Core Performance Analysis (2020): https://hpc.fau.de/files/2020/02/Masterarbeit_JL-_final.pdf
There's also a broader line of research on performance modeling in this vein (some pretty detailed, including microarchitectural details like branch misprediction penalties, ROB capacity, etc.): https://gist.github.com/MattPD/85aad98ee8b135e675d49c571b67f...
More on modeling microarchitectural details (chronological order):
- Tejas S. Karkhanis and James E. Smith. "A First-Order Superscalar Processor Model." (ISCA 2004) - http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.79.....
- Stijn Eyerman, Lieven Eeckhout, Tejas Karkhanis, and James E. Smith. "A mechanistic performance model for superscalar out-of-order processors." ACM Trans. Comput. Syst. 27, 2 (2009) - http://www.elis.ugent.be/~leeckhou/papers/tocs09.pdf
- Maximilien B. Breughe, Stijn Eyerman, and Lieven Eeckhout. "Mechanistic analytical modeling of superscalar in-order processor performance." ACM Trans. Architec. Code Optim. 11, 4, Article 50 (2014) - https://users.elis.ugent.be/~leeckhou/papers/taco2015-breugh....
- "Modeling Superscalar Processor Memory-Level Parallelism", Sam Van den Steen and Lieven Eeckhout, IEEE Computer Architecture Letters (CAL), Vol 17, No 1 (2018) - https://users.elis.ugent.be/~leeckhou/papers/cal2018-MLP.pdf