Using Machine Learning Techniques to Detect Parallel Patterns of Multi-threaded Applications

Multicore hardware and software are becoming increasingly more complex. The programmability problem of multicore software has led to the use of parallel patterns. Parallel patterns reduce the effort and time required to develop multicore software by effectively capturing its thread communication and data sharing characteristics. Hence, detecting the parallel pattern used in a multi-threaded application is crucial for performance improvements and enables many architectural optimizations; however, this topic has not been widely studied. We apply machine learning techniques in a novel approach to automatically detect parallel patterns and compare these techniques in terms of accuracy and speed. We experimentally validate the detection ability of our techniques on benchmarks including PARSEC and Rodinia. Our experiments show that the k-nearest neighbor, decision trees, and naive Bayes classifier are the most accurate techniques. Overall, decision trees are the fastest technique with the lowest characterization overhead producing the best combination of detection results. We also show the usefulness of the proposed techniques on synthetic benchmark generation.