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PPModel: a modeling tool for source code maintenance and optimization of parallel programs

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Abstract

As the computation power in desktops advances, parallel programming has emerged as one of the essential skills needed by next generation software engineers. However, programs written in popular parallel programming paradigms have a substantial amount of sequential code mixed with the parallel code. Several such versions supporting different platforms are necessary to find the optimum version of the program for the available resources and problem size. As revealed by our study on benchmark programs, sequential code is often duplicated in these versions. This can affect code comprehensibility and re-usability of the software. In this paper, we discuss a framework named PPModel, which is designed and implemented to free programmers from these scenarios. Using PPModel, a programmer can separate parallel blocks in a program, map these blocks to various platforms, and re-execute the entire program. We provide a graphical modeling tool (PPModel) intended for Eclipse users and a Domain-Specific Language (tPPModel) for non-Eclipse users to facilitate the separation, the mapping, and the re-execution. This is illustrated with a case study from a benchmark program, which involves re-targeting a parallel block to CUDA and another parallel block to OpenMP. The modified program gave almost 5× performance gain compared to the sequential counterpart, and 1.5× gain compared to the existing OpenMP version.

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Notes

  1. Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA), http://www.nvidia.com/cuda.

  2. Message Passing Interface (MPI), http://www.mpi-forum.org/.

  3. Open Multi-Processing (OpenMP), http://www.openmp.org.

  4. NASA Advanced SuperComputing (NAS), http://www.nas.nasa.gov/publications/npb.html.

  5. Classes used to define size in NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB): S-216, W-220, A-223, B-225, and C-227.

  6. Open Computing Language (OpenCL), http://www.kronos.org/opencl.

  7. Eclipse, http://www.eclipse.org.

  8. Graphical Modelling Framework (GMF), http://www.eclipse.org/gmf.

  9. Parallel Tools Platform (PTP), http://www.eclipse.org/ptp.

  10. C/C++ Development Tooling (CDT), http://www.eclipse.org/cdt.

  11. Another tool for Language Recognition (ANTLR), http://www.antlr.org.

  12. StringTemplate, http://www.stringtemplate.org.

  13. NAS Parallel Benchmark (NPB), http://www.nas.nasa.gov/Resources/Software/npb.html.

  14. Molecular dynamics simulation using CUDA, http://www-old.amolf.nl/~vanmeel/mdgpu/download2.html.

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Acknowledgements

This work was made possible in part by a grant of high performance computing resources and technical support from the Alabama Supercomputer Authority.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, USA

    Ferosh Jacob, Jeff Gray & Jeffrey C. Carver

  2. Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Maribor, Maribor, Slovenia

    Marjan Mernik

  3. Department of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, USA

    Purushotham Bangalore

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  1. Ferosh Jacob
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Correspondence to Ferosh Jacob.

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Jacob, F., Gray, J., Carver, J.C. et al. PPModel: a modeling tool for source code maintenance and optimization of parallel programs. J Supercomput 62, 1560–1582 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-012-0821-7

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