Automatic Parallelization of C by Means of Language Transcription

The automatic parallelization of C has always been frustrated by pointer arithmetic, irregular control flow and complicated data aggregation. Each of these problems is similar to familiar challenges encountered in the parallelization of more rigidly-structured languages such as FORTRAN. By creating a mapping from one language to the other, we can expose the capabilities of existing automatically parallelizing compilers to the C language. In this paper, we describe our approach to mapping applications written in C to a form suitable for the Polaris source-tosource FORTRAN compiler. We also describe the improvements in the compiled applications realized by this second level of transformation and show results for a small application in comparison to commercial compilers.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: LCPC
• Authors: Richard L. Kennell, Rudolf Eigenmann
• Keywords: Automatic Parallelization, Irregular Control Flow, LCPC 1998, Polaris Source-tosource Fortran, System Software