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Performance Evaluation and Enhancement of Process-Based Parallel Loop Execution

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Abstract

Parallel programming is known to be difficult and error-prone. Thread-based parallel execution has particular difficulties due to the tendency for the program to contain errors such as incorrect operation ordering, atomicity violation, and others. Worse yet, as many of such erroneous behaviors tend to be non-deterministic, the programmer is often unable to reproduce the exact event sequence that causes the program failure, which makes diagnosis difficult. In contrast, with process-based parallel execution, unintended data sharing can be avoided, thanks to the isolated address spaces among processes, which greatly simplifies the run-time program states, making it easier to reproduce and diagnose an error. Nonetheless, parallel loop execution on multicore has been dominated by parallel threads and thread-based language extensions and tools. This seems to be due to a long-held common wisdom that process-based parallel execution incurs much higher overhead. This paper reports experimental results that show the competitiveness of process-based parallel loop execution. Several benchmark programs of process-based parallel execution achieved speedups ranging from 6.73 to 20.24 on a 32 cores machine.

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Acknowledgments

Our thanks go to Lei Liu and Shuangde Fang for their suggestions on the earlier versions of the paper. This work is supported in part by the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (2012AA010902), the National Natural Science Foundation of China under the Grant (61432018), the Innovation Research Group of NSFC (61221062), and by the National Science Foundation (CNS-0915414).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. SKL Computer Architecture, Institute of Computing Technology, CAS, Beijing, China

    Xingjing Lu

  2. Huawei Technologies Co, Ltd, Shenzhen, China

    Long Chen

  3. Department of Computer Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Zhiyuan Li

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  1. Xingjing Lu
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  2. Long Chen
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  3. Zhiyuan Li
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Correspondence to Xingjing Lu.

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Lu, X., Chen, L. & Li, Z. Performance Evaluation and Enhancement of Process-Based Parallel Loop Execution. Int J Parallel Prog 45, 185–198 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10766-015-0394-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10766-015-0394-1

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