Title
Pure Functions In C: A Small Keyword For Automatic Parallelization
Abstract
The need for parallel task execution has been steadily growing in recent years since manufacturers mainly improve processor performance by increasing the number of installed cores instead of scaling the processor's frequency. To make use of this potential, an essential technique to increase the parallelism of a program is to parallelize loops. Several automatic loop nest parallelizers have been developed in the past such as PluTo. The main restriction of these tools is that the loops must be statically analyzable which, among other things, disallows function calls within the loops. In this article, we present a seemingly simple extension to the C programming language which marks functions without side-effects. These functions can then basically be ignored when the automatic parallelizer checks the parallelizability of loops. We integrated the approach into the GCC compiler toolchain and evaluated it by running several real-world applications. Our experiments show that the C extension helps to identify additional parallelization opportunities and, thus, to significantly increase the performance of applications.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1007/s10766-020-00660-4
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PARALLEL PROGRAMMING
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Parallel computing, Programming, Compiler, Automatic parallelization, Polyhedral model, Side-effect, Pure function
Journal
49
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
0885-7458
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Tim Süß100.34
Lars Nagel27613.58
Marc-Andre Vef362.11
Andre Brinkmann420227.48
dustin feld572.53
Thomas Soddemann600.34