In compiler research, polytopes and related mathematical objects have been successfully used for several decades to represent and manipulate computer programs in an approach that has become known as the polyhedral model. The key insight is that the kernels of many compute-intensive applications are composed of loops with bounds that are afflne combinations of symbolic constants and outer loop iterators. The iterations of a loop nest can then be represented as the integer points in a (parametric) polytope and manipulated as a whole, rather than as individual iterations. A similar reasoning holds for the elements of an array and for mappings between loop iterations and array elements.
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