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A Generic Approach to Efficiently Parallelize Legacy Sequential Software

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Information Technology - New Generations

Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 738))

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Abstract

Multi-core processing units have been the answer to ever increasing demand of computational power of modern software. One of the main issues with the adoption of new hardware is portability of legacy software. In this specific case, in order for legacy sequential software to maximize the exploitation of the computational benefits brought by multi-core processors, it has to undergo a parallelization effort. Although there is a common agreement and well-specified support for parallelizing sequential algorithms, there is still a lack in supporting software engineers in identifying and assessing parallelization potentials in a legacy sequential application. In this work we provide a generic parallelization approach which supports the engineering in maximizing performance gain through parallelization while minimizing the cost of the parallelization effort. We evaluate the approach on an industrial use-case at ABB Robotics.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The parallelization budget depends on several factors and it represents the budget in terms of maximum parallelization effort by which the parallelization itself is considered preferable to a re-implementation from scratch.

  2. 2.

    An alternative to Amdahl’s law is represented by Gustafson’s law [11], which can be more suitable when parallelizing algorithms that can expand the amount of computation to fit the amount of parallelization available.

  3. 3.

    http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/thread.

  4. 4.

    http://www.openmp.org/.

  5. 5.

    https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-zone.

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Acknowledgements

This research is partially supported by the Knowledge Foundation through the MOMENTUM project (http://www.es.mdh.se/projects/458-MOMENTUM).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. ABB Robotics, Västerås, Sweden

    Andreas Granholm

  2. Mälardalen University – IDT, Västerås, Sweden

    Federico Ciccozzi

Authors
  1. Andreas Granholm
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  2. Federico Ciccozzi
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Correspondence to Federico Ciccozzi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA

    Shahram Latifi

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Granholm, A., Ciccozzi, F. (2018). A Generic Approach to Efficiently Parallelize Legacy Sequential Software. In: Latifi, S. (eds) Information Technology - New Generations. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 738. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77028-4_59

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77028-4_59

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-77027-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-77028-4

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