How much parallelism is there in irregular applications?

Irregular programs are programs organized around pointer-based data structures such as trees and graphs. Recent investigations by the Galois project have shown that many irregular programs have a generalized form of data-parallelism called amorphous data-parallelism. However, in many programs, amorphous dataparallelism cannot be uncovered using static techniques, and its exploitation requires runtime strategies such as optimistic parallel execution. This raises a natural question: how much amorphous data-parallelism actually exists in irregular programs? In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a tool called ParaMeter that produces parallelism profiles for irreggrams. Parallelism profiles are an abstract measure of the amount of amorphous data-parallelism at different points in the execution of an algorithm, independent of implementation-dependent details such as the number of cores, cache sizes, load-balancing, etc. ParaMeter can also generate constrained paralleli...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: PPOPP
• Authors: Milind Kulkarni, Martin Burtscher, Rajeshkar Inkulu, Keshav Pingali, Calin Cascaval
• Keywords: Constrained Parallelism Profiles, Irregular Programs, Parallel Computing, Parallelism Profiles, PPOPP 2009