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Compiling C for the EARTH multithreaded architecture

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Abstract

Multithreaded architectures provide an opportunity for efficiently executing programs with irregular parallelism and/or irregular locality. This paper presents a strategy that makes use of the multithreaded execution model without exposing multithreading to the programmer. Our approach is to design simple extensions to C, and to provide compiler support that automatically translates high-level C programs into lower-level threaded programs. In this paper we present EARTH-C our extended C language which contains simple constructs for specifying control parallelism, data locality, shared variables and atomic operations. Based on EARTH-C, we describe compiler techniques that are used for translating to lower-level Threaded-C programs for the EARTH multithreaded architecture. We demonstrate our approach with six benchmark programs. We show that even naive EARTH-C programs can lead to reasonable performance, and that more advanced EARTH-C programs can give performance very close to hand-coded threated-C programs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science, McGill University, H3A 2A7, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

    Laurie J. Hendren, Xinan Tang, Yingchun Zhu, Shereen Ghobrial, Guang R. Gao, Xun Xue, Haiying Cai & Pierre Ouellet

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  1. Laurie J. Hendren
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  2. Xinan Tang
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  3. Yingchun Zhu
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  4. Shereen Ghobrial
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  5. Guang R. Gao
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  6. Xun Xue
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  7. Haiying Cai
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  8. Pierre Ouellet
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This work supported, in part, by NSERC and FCAR.

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Hendren, L.J., Tang, X., Zhu, Y. et al. Compiling C for the EARTH multithreaded architecture. Int J Parallel Prog 25, 305–338 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02699905

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