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Optimistic parallelism requires abstractions

Authors:

Milind Kulkarni,

Keshav Pingali,

Ganesh Ramanarayanan,

L. Paul ChewAuthors Info & Claims

Communications of the ACM, Volume 52, Issue 9

Pages 89 - 97

https://doi.org/10.1145/1562164.1562188

Published: 01 September 2009 Publication History

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Abstract

The problem of writing software for multicore processors is greatly simplified if we could automatically parallelize sequential programs. Although auto-parallelization has been studied for many decades, it has succeeded only in a few application areas such as dense matrix computations. In particular, auto-parallelization of irregular programs, which are organized around large, pointer-based data structures like graphs, has seemed intractable.

The Galois project is taking a fresh look at autoparallelization. Rather than attempt to parallelize all programs no matter how obscurely they are written, we are designing programming abstractions that permit programmers to highlight opportunities for exploiting parallelism in sequential programs, and building a runtime system that uses these hints to execute the program in parallel. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a system based on these ideas. Experimental results for two real-world irregular applications, a Delaunay mesh refinement application and a graphics application that performs agglomerative clustering, demonstrate that this approach is promising.

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Cited By

Martínez MFraguela BCabaleiro JRivera F(2024)A new thread-level speculative automatic parallelization model and library based on duplicate code executionThe Journal of Supercomputing10.1007/s11227-024-05987-0Online publication date: 11-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-024-05987-0
Fuchs PMargan DGiceva J(2023)Sortledton: a Universal Graph Data StructureACM SIGMOD Record10.1145/3604437.360444252:1(17-25)Online publication date: 8-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3604437.3604442
Fuchs PMargan DGiceva J(2022)SortledtonProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3514061.351406515:6(1173-1186)Online publication date: 22-Jun-2022
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Index Terms

Optimistic parallelism requires abstractions
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Concurrent computing methodologies
    1. Concurrent programming languages
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language types
        Concurrent programming languages

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Published In

cover image Communications of the ACM

Communications of the ACM Volume 52, Issue 9

The Status of the P versus NP Problem

September 2009

139 pages

ISSN:0001-0782

EISSN:1557-7317

DOI:10.1145/1562164

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2009 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 01 September 2009

Published in CACM Volume 52, Issue 9

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Cited By

Martínez MFraguela BCabaleiro JRivera F(2024)A new thread-level speculative automatic parallelization model and library based on duplicate code executionThe Journal of Supercomputing10.1007/s11227-024-05987-0Online publication date: 11-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-024-05987-0
Fuchs PMargan DGiceva J(2023)Sortledton: a Universal Graph Data StructureACM SIGMOD Record10.1145/3604437.360444252:1(17-25)Online publication date: 8-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3604437.3604442
Fuchs PMargan DGiceva J(2022)SortledtonProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3514061.351406515:6(1173-1186)Online publication date: 22-Jun-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.14778/3514061.3514065
Dickerson TKoskinen EGazzillo PHerlihy M(2019)Conflict Abstractions and Shadow Speculation for Optimistic Transactional ObjectsProgramming Languages and Systems10.1007/978-3-030-34175-6_16(313-331)Online publication date: 18-Nov-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34175-6_16
Estebanez ALlanos DGonzalez-Escribano A(2017)Using the Xeon Phi Platform to Run Speculatively-Parallelized CodesInternational Journal of Parallel Programming10.1007/s10766-016-0421-x45:2(225-241)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10766-016-0421-x
Estebanez ALlanos DGonzalez-Escribano A(2016)A Survey on Thread-Level Speculation TechniquesACM Computing Surveys10.1145/293836949:2(1-39)Online publication date: 30-Jun-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2938369
Estebanez ALlanos DGonzalez-Escribano A(2016)New Data Structures to Handle Speculative Parallelization at RuntimeInternational Journal of Parallel Programming10.1007/s10766-014-0347-044:3(407-426)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10766-014-0347-0
McCune RWeninger TMadey G(2015)Thinking Like a VertexACM Computing Surveys10.1145/281818548:2(1-39)Online publication date: 12-Oct-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2818185
Tithi JMatani DMenghani GChowdhury R(2013)Avoiding Locks and Atomic Instructions in Shared-Memory Parallel BFS Using Optimistic ParallelizationProceedings of the 2013 IEEE 27th International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing Workshops and PhD Forum10.1109/IPDPSW.2013.241(1628-1637)Online publication date: 20-May-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/IPDPSW.2013.241
Philippsen MTillmann NBrinkers D(2013)Double Inspection for Run-Time Loop ParallelizationLanguages and Compilers for Parallel Computing10.1007/978-3-642-36036-7_4(46-60)Online publication date: 2013
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36036-7_4
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