Communication-aware Parallelization Strategies for High Performance Applications

With the advent of multicore processor architectures and the existence of a huge legacy code base, the need for efficient and scalable parallelizing compilers is growing. Where multi-core processors were seen as the way forward to address the known challenges such as the memory, power and ILP wall, efficient parallelization to make use of the multiple cores, is still an open issue. In this paper, we present two complementary tools, MCROF and XPU which provide an alternative development path to parallelise applications and that address the challenges of identifying potential parallelism and exploiting it in a different way. The MCROF tool provides a detailed profile of the data flowing inside an application and the XPU programming paradigm provides an intuitive and simple interface to express parallelism as well as the necessary runtime support. We demonstrate through two different use cases that better performance up to 4x can be achieved than available commercial compilers.