A Practical Approach to Exploiting Coarse-Grained Pipeline Parallelism in C Programs

The emergence of multicore processors has heightened the need for effective parallel programming practices. In addition to writing new parallel programs, the next generation of programmers will be faced with the overwhelming task of migrating decades’ worth of legacy C code into a parallel representation. Addressing this problem requires a toolset of parallel programming primitives that can broadly apply to both new and existing programs. While tools such as threads and OpenMP allow programmers to express task and data parallelism, support for pipeline parallelism is distinctly lacking. In this paper, we offer a new and pragmatic approach to leveraging coarse-grained pipeline parallelism in C programs. We target the domain of streaming applications, such as audio, video, and digital signal processing, which exhibit regular flows of data. To exploit pipeline parallelism, we equip the programmer with a simple set of annotations (indicating pipeline boundaries) and a dynamic analysis ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: MICRO
• Authors: William Thies, Vikram Chandrasekhar, Saman P. Amarasinghe
• Keywords: Coarse-grained Pipeline Parallelism, Hardware, MICRO 2007, Parallel Programming, Pipeline Parallelism