Loop sectioning

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In geometry and the mathematical discipline of topology, loop strip-mining, or sectioning, [1] is a special case of tiling, namely 1-dimensional tiling: a loop is transformed into a depth-2 loop nest, where the outer loop is called tile/block loop and the innermost loop is called element loop. Strip-mining was introduced for vector processors. It is a loop-transformation technique for enabling vectorization of loops and improving memory performance.

The term strip-mine is really inspired from mining coal, for example, with the excavator, which uses a bucket (or bucket wheel) to "strip" the coal.

References

  1. Hijma, Pieter; Heldens, Stijn; Sclocco, Alessio; Van Werkhoven, Ben; Bal, Henri E. (30 November 2023). "Optimization Techniques for GPU Programming". dl.acm.org. ACM Computing Surveys. pp. 1–81. doi:10.1145/3570638 . Retrieved 7 October 2025.