Inter-procedural strength reduction is provided by a mechanism of the present invention to optimize software program. During a forward pass, the present invention collects information of global variables and analyzes the information to select candidate computations for optimization. During a backward pass, the present invention replaces costly computations with less costly or weaker computations using pre-computed values and inserts store operations of new global variables to pre-compute the costly computations at definition points of the global variables used in the costly computations.