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by lpage 2138 days ago
This pencil and paper approach to breaking up work is good at parallelizing things that don't appear parallelizable at first glance, e.g. prefix sum [1]. Compilers are good at identifying opportunities to reorder instructions in ways that break low level data dependencies. They tend to miss the big higher level opportunities like this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefix_sum#:~:text=A%20work%2D....