Revisiting the Sequential Programming Model for Multi-Core

Single-threaded programming is already considered a complicated task. The move to multi-threaded programming only increases the complexity and cost involved in software development due to rewriting legacy code, training of the programmer, increased debugging of the program, and efforts to avoid race conditions, deadlocks, and other problems associated with parallel programming. To address these costs, other approaches, such as automatic thread extraction, have been explored. Unfortunately, the amount of parallelism that has been automatically extracted is generally insufficient to keep many cores busy. This paper argues that this lack of parallelism is not an intrinsic limitation of the sequential programming model, but rather occurs for two reasons. First, there exists no framework for automatic thread extraction that brings together key existing state-of-the-art compiler and hardware techniques. This paper shows that such a framework can yield scalable parallelization on several SP...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: MICRO
• Authors: Matthew J. Bridges, Neil Vachharajani, Yun Zhang, Thomas B. Jablin, David I. August
• Keywords: Automatic Thread Extraction, Hardware, MICRO 2007, Sequential Programming, Sequential Programming Model