Using optimistic execution techniques as a parallelisation tool for general purpose computing

Abstract

Optimistic execution techniques are widely used in the field of parallel discrete event simulation. In this paper we discuss the use of optimism as a technique for parallelising programs written in a general purpose programming language. We present the design and implementation of a compiler system which uses optimistic simulation techniques to execute sequential C ++ programs. The use of optimistic techniques is seen as a new direction in parallelisation technology: conventional parallelising compilers are based on static (compile-time) data dependency analysis. The reliance on static information imposes an overly restrictive view of the parallelism available in a program. The static view must always be the worst case view: if it is possible for a data dependency to occur, then it must be assumed always to occur.