Loop sectioning explained

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.

Notes and References

  1. Web site: Hijma . Pieter . Heldens . Stijn . Sclocco . Alessio . Van Werkhoven . Ben . Bal . Henri E. . Optimization Techniques for GPU Programming . dl.acm.org . ACM Computing Surveys . 7 October 2025 . 1–81 . en . 10.1145/3570638 . 30 November 2023.