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Dynamic resolution: A runtime technique for the parallelization of modifications to directed acyclic graphs

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Abstract

Static program analysis limits the performance improvements possible from compile-time parallelization.Dynamic parallelization shifts a portion of the analysis from compile-time to runtime, thereby enabling optimizations whose static detection is overly expensive or impossible.Dynamic resolution is a dynamic-parallelization technique for finding loop and nonloop parallelism in imperative, sequential programs that destructively manipulate dynamic directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). Dynamic resolution uses runtime reference counts on heap data, a runtime linearization of threads, and a simple static analysis to dynamically detect potential heap aliases and to correctly coordinate parallel access to shared structures. We describe dynamic resolution in the context of two imperative procedures: DAG rewrite and destructive quicksort. The description is couched in the pointer-safe language ML; with some programmer assertions and custom macros for pointer and memory manipulation, dynamic resolution is applicable to pointer-unsafe languages (C extended with threads) as well. Furthermore, with programmer identification of cyclic structure, dynamic resolution can be used to find parallelism in programs that manipulate cyclic structures. Shared-memory implementations of dynamic resolution for ML and C have attained parallel speedup for nontrivial sequential procedures such as destructive quicksort; empirical speedup results obtained on fast contemporary machines are given.

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  1. Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, 700 Mountain Ave., 07974, Murray Hill, New Jersey

    Lorenz Huelsbergen

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  1. Lorenz Huelsbergen
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Huelsbergen, L. Dynamic resolution: A runtime technique for the parallelization of modifications to directed acyclic graphs. Int J Parallel Prog 25, 385–417 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02699884

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