Interaction with the User in the SAPFOR System

Automation of parallel programming is important at any stage of parallel program development. These stages include profiling of the original program, program transformation, which allows us to achieve higher performance after program parallelization, and, finally, construction and optimization of the parallel program. It is also important to choose a suitable parallel programming model to express parallelism available in a program. On the one hand, the parallel programming model should be capable to map the parallel program to a variety of existing hardware resources. On the other hand, it should simplify the development of the assistant tools and it should allow the user to explore the parallel program the assistant tools generate in a semi-automatic way. The SAPFOR (System FOR Automated Parallelization) system combines various approaches to automation of parallel programming. Moreover, it allows the user to guide the parallelization if necessary. SAPFOR produces parallel programs according to the high-level DVMH parallel programming model which simplify the development of efficient parallel programs for heterogeneous computing clusters. This paper focuses on the approach to semi-automatic parallel programming, which SAPFOR implements. We discuss the architecture of the system and present the interactive subsystem which is useful to guide the SAPFOR through program parallelization. We used the interactive subsystem to parallelize programs from the NAS Parallel Benchmarks in a semi-automatic way. Finally, we compare the performance of manually written parallel programs with programs the SAPFOR system builds.

Reconstruction of Multi-Dimensional Form of Linearized Accesses to Arrays in SAPFOR

The system for automated parallelization SAPFOR (System FOR Automated Parallelization) includes tools for program analysis and transformation. The main goal of the system is to reduce the complexity of program parallelization. SAPFOR system is focused on the investigation of multilingual applications in Fortran and C programming languages. The low-level LLVM IR representation is used in SAPFOR for program analysis. This representation allows us to perform various IR-level optimizations to improve the quality of program analysis. At the same time, it loses some features of the program, which are available in its higher level representation. One of these features is the multi-dimensional structure of the arrays. Data dependence analysis is one of the main problems which should be solved to automate program parallelization. Moreover, such an analysis belongs to the class of NP-hard problems. Knowledge of the multidimensional structure of arrays allows in many cases to take into account the structure of index expressions in calls to arrays and reduce the complexity of the analysis. In addition, the use of multi-dimensional arrays allows us to use multi-dimensional processor matrix and to parallelize a whole loop nests, rather than a single loop in the nest. So, parallelism of a program is going to be increased. These opportunities are natively supported in the DVM system. This paper discusses the approach used in the SAPFOR system to recover the form of multi-dimensional arrays by their linearized representation in LLVM IR. The proposed approach has been successfully evaluated on various applications including performance tests from the NAS Parallel Benchmarks suite.

Investigation of Data Dependencies by Dynamic Analysis of Sapfor

The use of pointers and indirect memory accesses in the program, as well as the complex control flow are some of the main weaknesses of the static analysis of programs. The program properties investigated by this analysis are too conservative to accurately describe program behavior and hence they prevent parallel execution of the program. The application of dynamic analysis allows us to expand the capabilities of semi-automatic parallelization. In the SAPFOR system (System FOR Automated Parallelization), a dynamic analysis tool has been implemented, based on on the instrumentation of the LLVM representation of an analyzed program, which allows the system to explore programs in both C and Fortran programming languages. The capabilities of the static analysis implemented in SAPFOR are used to reduce the overhead program execution, while maintaining the completeness of the analysis. The use of static analysis allows to reduce the number of analyzed memory accesses and to ignore scalar variables, which can be explored in a static way. The developed tool was tested on performance tests from the NAS Parallel Benchmarks package for C and Fortran languages. The implementation of dynamic analysis, in addition to traditional types of data dependencies (flow, anit, output), allows us to determine privitizable variables and a possibility of pipeline execution of loops. Together with the capabilities of DVM and OpenMP these greatly facilitates program parallelization and simplify insertion of the appropriate compiler directives.

Ranking Functions for Linear-Constraint Loops

Ranking functions are a tool successfully used in termination analysis, complexity analysis, and program parallelization.Among the different types of ranking functions and approaches to finding them, this talk will concentrate onfunctions that are found by linear programming techniques. The setting is that ofa loop that has been pre-abstracted so thatit is described by linear constraints over a finite set of numeric variables.I will review results (more or less recent) regarding the search forranking functions which are either linear or lexicographic-linear.