An Experimentation Platform for the Automatic Parallelization of R Programs

We present our ALCHEMY platform that supports the automatic parallelization of R programs during execution. Parallelization occurs fully transparent to the user. Different parallelization techniques can be implemented as modules, linked into the platform, and combined with each other. The parallelization analysis modules and code transformation modules use a new intermediate representation for sequential and parallelized R code. Successfully parallelized parts of the R program are executed on a multicore processor; the results and the remaining sequential parts are fed back into the standard R interpreter and evaluated to completion. This way, an R user can benefit from multiprocessor performance without writing a single line of parallel code. At this stage of the research project, the main goal is to enable ample experimentation with different approaches to the automatic parallelization of scripting languages such as R.