Brief announcement: serial-parallel reciprocity in dynamic multithreaded languages

  • Authors:

  • Kunal Agrawal;I-Ting Angelina Lee;Jim Sukha

  • Affiliations:

  • Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA;MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA;MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the twenty-second annual ACM symposium on Parallelism in algorithms and architectures
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

In dynamically multithreaded platforms that employ work stealing, there appears to be a fundamental tradeoff between providing provably good time and space bounds and supporting SP-reciprocity, the property of allowing arbitrary calling between parallel and serial code, including legacy serial binaries. Many known dynamically multithreaded platforms either fail to support SP-reciprocity or sacrifice on the provable time and space bounds that an efficient work-stealing scheduler could otherwise guarantee. We describe PR-Cilk, a design of a runtime system that supports SP-reciprocity in PR-Cilk and provides provable bounds on time and space. In order to maintain the space bound, PR-Cilk uses subtree-restricted work stealing. We show that with subtree-restricted work stealing, PR-Cilk provides the same guarantee on stack space usage as ordinary Cilk. The completion time guaranteed by PR-Cilk is slightly worse than ordinary Cilk. Nevertheless, if the number of times a C function calls a Cilk function is small, or if each Cilk function called by a C function is sufficiently parallel, PR-Cilk still guarantees linear speedup.