Restoration of legacy parallelism in C and C++ applications
Abstract
Parallel patterns are a high-level programming paradigm that enables non-experts in parallelism to develop structured parallel programs that are maintainable, adaptive, and portable whilst achieving good performance on a variety of parallel systems. However, there still exists a large base of legacy-parallel code developed using ad-hoc methods and incorporating low-level parallel/concurrency libraries such as pthreads without any parallel patterns in the fundamental design. This code would benefit from being restructured and rewritten into pattern-based code. However, the process of rewriting the code is laborious and error-prone, due to typical concurrency and pthreading code being closely intertwined throughout the business logic of the program. In this paper, we present a new software restoration methodology, to transform legacy-parallel programs implemented using e.g. pthreads into structured patterned equivalents. We demonstrate our restoration technique on a number of benchmarks, allowing the introduction of patterned parallelism in the resulting code; we record improvements in cyclomatic complexity and speedups.
Citation
Brown , C M , Barwell , A D & Janjic , V 2020 , ' Restoration of legacy parallelism in C and C++ applications ' , Paper presented at 13th International Symposium on High-Level Parallel Programming and Applications (HLPP 2020) Porto, Portugal July 9-10, 2020 , 9/07/20 - 10/07/20 . conference
Status
Peer reviewed
Type
Conference paper
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