Paper Info
Title
The Paralax infrastructure: automatic parallelization with a helping hand
Abstract
Speeding up sequential programs on multicores is a challenging problem that is in urgent need of a solution. Automatic parallelization of irregular pointer-intensive codes, exemplified by the SPECint codes, is a very hard problem. This paper shows that, with a helping hand, such auto-parallelization is possible and fruitful. This paper makes the following contributions: (i) A compiler-framework for extracting pipeline-like parallelism from outer program loops is presented. (ii) Using a light-weight programming model based on annotations, the programmer helps the compiler to find thread-level parallelism. Each of the annotations specifies only a small piece of semantic information that compiler analysis misses, e.g. stating that a variable is dead at a certain program point. The annotations are designed such that correctness is easily verified. Furthermore, we present a tool for suggesting annotations to the programmer. (iii) The methodology is applied to auto-parallelize several SPECint benchmarks. For the benchmark with most parallelism (hmmer), we obtain a scalable 7-fold speedup on an AMD quad-core dual processor. The annotations constitute a parallel programming model that relies extensively on a sequential program representation. Hereby, the complexity of debugging is not increased and it does not obscure the source code. These properties could prove valuable to increase the efficiency of parallel programming.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1145/1854273.1854322
PACT
Keywords
Field
DocType
automatic parallelization,light-weight programming model,parallel programming model,specint benchmarks,thread-level parallelism,parallel programming,paralax infrastructure,outer program loop,certain program point,sequential program,sequential program representation,pipeline-like parallelism,processors,source code,concurrent programming,programming languages,thread level parallelism,compilers,programming model
Programming language,Programmer,Programming paradigm,Source code,Computer science,Parallel computing,Compiler,Parallel programming model,SPECint,Automatic parallelization,Debugging
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-5090-5032-1
46
1.27
References 
Authors
30
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Hans Vandierendonck162954.43
Sean Rul21024.89
Koen De Bosschere31659117.74