Evaluating automatic parallelization for efficient execution on shared-memory multiprocessors

• Authors: Kathryn S. McKinley
• Venue: ICS '94 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Supercomputing
• Year: 1994

We present a parallel code generation algorithm for complete applications and a new experimental methodology that tests the efficacy of our approach. The algorithm optimizes for data locality and parallelism, reducing or eliminating false sharing. It also uses interprocedural analysis and transformations to improve the granularity of parallelism. Although the individual components of the algorithm have been published previously, their coordination is unique to this paper. For experimental validation, we do not attempt to parallelize “dusty deck” programs where many have tried and failed. Instead, we collect programs where the users tried to achieve excellent parallel performance. We apply our optimizations to sequential versions of these programs, i.e., the compiler was required to use its analysis and algorithms to parallelize the program and could not rely on user assertions that for example, a loop is parallel. With this metric, our algorithm improves or matches hand-coded parallel programs on shared-memory, bus-based parallel machines for eight of the nine programs in our test suite.