Employing finite automata for resource scheduling

Static instruction scheduling is an important optimization to exploit instruction level parallelism. If the scheduler has to consider resource constraints to prevent structural hazards, usually the processor timing is simulated by overlaying binary matrices representing the resource usage of instructions. This technique is rather time consuming. It is shown that the timing can be simulated by a deterministic finite automaton and the matrix operations for a simulation step are replaced by two table lookups. A prototype implementation shows that about an eighteenfold speedup of the simulation can be expected. This performance gain can be used either to speed up existing scheduling algorithms or to use more complex algorithms to improve scheduling results