Inter-procedural strength reduction is provided by a mechanism of the present invention to improve data cache performance. During a forward pass, the present invention collects information of global variables and analyzes the usage pattern of global objects to select candidate computations for optimization. During a backward pass, the present invention remaps global objects into smaller size new global objects and generates more cache efficient code by replacing candidate computations with indirect or indexed reference of smaller global objects and inserting store operations to the new global objects for each computation that references the candidate global objects.