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The BonaFide C Analyzer: automatic loop-level characterization and coverage measurement

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Abstract

The advent of multicore technologies has increased the interest in parallelization techniques for existing sequential applications. These techniques include the need of detecting loops that are good candidates for parallelization, and classifying all variables of these loops according to their use, a task surprisingly hard to be carried out manually. In this paper, we introduce the BonaFide C Analyzer, an XML-based framework that combines static analysis of source code with profiling information to generate complete reports regarding all loops in a C application, including loop coverage, loop suitability for parallelization, a classification of all variables inside loops based on their accesses, and other hurdles that restrict the parallelization. This information allows to analyze how particular language constructs are used in real-world applications, and helps the programmer to parallelize the code. To show the features of the framework, we present the results of an in-depth loop characterization of C applications that are part of the SPEC CPU2006 benchmark suite. Our study shows that 47.72 % of loops present in the applications analyzed are potentially parallelizable with existent parallel programming models such as OpenMP, while an additional 37.7 % of loops could be run in parallel with the help of runtime speculative parallelization techniques.

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Notes

  1. Further analysis may be required to ensure that, after parallel execution, final values stored in private variables meet sequential semantics.

  2. Inclusive execution time of a loop is the amount of time that the loop consumes, including the time spent by its nested loops and functions called from this loop. By contrast, exclusive execution time of a loop is the time that the loop consumes by itself, excluding the time spent by its nested loops and function calls.

  3. This feature has been added with the help of the ListUtils package, provided by Apache Commons [32], that allows to apply operations as union or intersection over sets of variables.

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Acknowledgments

This research is partly supported by the Castilla-Leon Regional Government (VA172A12-2); Ministerio de Industria, Spain (CENIT OCEANLIDER); MICINN (Spain) and the European Union FEDER (MOGECOPP project TIN2011-25639, CAPAP-H3 network TIN2010-12011-E, CAPAP-H4 network TIN2011-15734-E). Sergio Aldea is supported by a research grant (EDU/1204/2010) of Consejería de Educación, Junta de Castilla y León, Spain, and the European Social Fund.

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  1. Dpto. Informática, Universidad de Valladolid, Campus Miguel Delibes, 47011 , Valladolid, Spain

    Sergio Aldea, Diego R. Llanos & Arturo Gonzalez-Escribano

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  1. Sergio Aldea
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  2. Diego R. Llanos
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  3. Arturo Gonzalez-Escribano
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Correspondence to Sergio Aldea.

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Aldea, S., Llanos, D.R. & Gonzalez-Escribano, A. The BonaFide C Analyzer: automatic loop-level characterization and coverage measurement. J Supercomput 68, 1378–1401 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-014-1091-3

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