Abstract

Modern-day microprocessors are measured in part by their parallel performance. Parallelizing sequential programs is a complex task, requiring data dependence analysis of the program constructs. Researchers in the field of parallel optimization are working on shifting the optimization effort from the programmer to the compiler. The goal of this work is for the compiler to visually expose the parallel characteristics of the program to researchers as well as programmers for a better understanding of the parallel properties of their programs. In order to do that we developed Exposed Parallelism Visualization (EPV), a statically-generated graphical tool that builds a parallel task graph of source code after it has been converted to the LLVM compiler frameworkq s Intermediate Representation (IR). The goal is for this visual representation of IR to provide new insights about the parallel properties of the program without having to execute the program. This will help researchers and programmers to understand if and where parallelism exists in the program at compile time. With this understanding, researchers will be able to more easily develop compiler algorithms that identify parallelism and improve program performance, and programmers will easily identify parallelizable sections of code that can be executed in multiple cores or accelerators such as GPUs or FPGAs. To the best of our knowledge, EPV is the first static visualization tool made for the identification of parallelism.

Degree

MS

College and Department

Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering and Technology; Electrical and Computer Engineering

Rights

http://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/

Date Submitted

2017-07-01

Document Type

Thesis

Handle

http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/etd9411

Keywords

parallel programs, software visualization, parallel loops

Language

english

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