Access Annotation for Safe Program Parallelization

Abstract

Abstract. The safety of speculative parallelization depends on monitoring all program access to shared data. The problem is especially difficult in softwarebased solutions. Till now, automatic techniques use either program instrumentation, which can be costly, or virtual memory protection, which incurs false sharing. In addition, not all access requires monitoring. It is worth considering a manual approach in which programmers insert access annotations to reduce the cost and increase the precision of program monitoring.This paper presents an interface for access annotation and two techniques to check the correctness of user annotation, i.e. whether all parallel executions are properly monitored and guaranteed to produce the sequential result. It gives a quadratic-time algorithm to check the exponential number of parallel interleavings. The paper then uses the annotation interface to parallelize several programs with uncertain parallelism. It demonstrates the efficiency of program monitoring by a performance comparison with OpenMP, which does not monitor data access or guarantee safety.

Safe parallel programming using dynamic dependence hints

“…BOP provides an annotation interface for recording data access at byte granular-ity [11]. If a programmer or a compiler knows all the places a variable is accessed, the data can be monitored precisely, which avoids false sharing and the pageprotection overhead.…”