AutopaR: An Automatic Parallelization Tool for Recursive Calls

Abstract

Manycore systems are becoming more and more powerful with the integration of hundreds of cores on a single chip. However, writing parallel programs on these manycore systems has become a problem since the amount of available parallel tools and applications are limited. Although exploiting parallelism in software is possible, it requires different design decisions, significant programmer effort and is error prone. Different libraries and tools try to make the transition to parallelism easier, however there is no concrete system to make it transparent to software developer. To this end, our proposed tool is a step forward to improve the current state. Our approach, Autopar, specifically aims at achieving automatic parallelization of recursive applications using static program analysis. It first decides on the recursive functions of a given program. Then, it performs analysis and collects information about these recursive functions. Our analysis module automatically collects program information without requiring any modification in the program design or developer involvement. Finally, it achieves automatic parallelization by introducing necessary OpenMP pragmas in appropriate places in the application. © 2014 IEEE.