Commutativity analysis for software parallelization: letting program transformations see the big picture

Extracting performance from many-core architectures requires software engineers to create multi-threaded applications, which significantly complicates the already daunting task of software development. One solution to this problem is automatic compile-time parallelization, which can ease the burden on software developers in many situations. Clearly, automatic parallelization in its present form is not suitable for many application domains and new compiler analyses are needed address its shortcomings. In this paper, we present one such analysis: a new approach for detecting commutative functions. Commutative functions are sections of code that can be executed in any order without affecting the outcome of the application, e.g., inserting elements into a set. Previous research on this topic had one significant limitation, in that the results of a commutative functions must produce identical memory layouts. This prevented previous techniques from detecting functions like malloc, which may...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ASPLOS
• Authors: Farhana Aleen, Nathan Clark
• Keywords: ASPLOS 2009, Automatic Compile-time Parallelization, Commutative Functions, Facilitate Automatic Parallelization, Programming Languages