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Potential thread-level-parallelism exploration with superblock reordering

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Abstract

The growing number of processing cores in a single CPU is demanding more parallelism from sequential programs. But in the past decades few work has succeeded in automatically exploiting enough parallelism, which casts a shadow over the many-core architecture and the automatic parallelization research. However, actually few work was tried to understand the nature, or amount, of the potentially available parallelism in programs. In this paper we will analyze at runtime the dynamic data dependencies among superblocks of sequential programs. We designed a meta re-arrange buffer to measure and exploit the available parallelism, with which the superblocks are dynamically analyzed, reordered and dispatched to run in parallel on an ideal many-core processor, while the data dependencies and program correctness are still maintained. In our experiments, we observed that with the superblock reordering, the potential speedup ranged from 1.08 to 89.60. The results showed that the potential parallelism of normal programs was still far from fully exploited by existing technologies. This observation makes the automatic parallelization a promising research direction for many-core architectures.

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Acknowledgments

This research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 61070001, the National Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province No. LQ12F02017, the Special Funds for Key Program of the China No. 2011ZX0302-004-002 and 2012ZX01031001-003, the Key Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province under Grand No. 2010C11048, Open Fund of Mobile Netwok Application Technology Key Labotatory of Zhejiang Province, Innovation Group of New Generation of Mobile Internet Software and Services of Zhejiang Province.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computer Science, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310028, People’s Republic China

    John Ye & Tianzhou Chen

  2. City College, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310028, People’s Republic China

    Hui Yan & Honglun Hou

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  1. John Ye
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  2. Hui Yan
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  3. Honglun Hou
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Correspondence to John Ye.

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Ye, J., Yan, H., Hou, H. et al. Potential thread-level-parallelism exploration with superblock reordering. Computing 96, 545–564 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00607-014-0387-8

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