Visualizing Potential Parallelism in Sequential Programs [
abstract] (
PDF)
Graham D. Price, John Giacomoni, and Manish VachharajaniThe 17th International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT), October 2008.
This paper presents ParaMeter, an interactive program analysis and
visualization system for large traces. Using ParaMeter, a software
developer can locate and analyze regions of code that may yield to
parallelization efforts and to possibly extract performance from
multicore hardware. The key contributions in the paper are (1) a
method to use interactive visualization of traces to find and exploit
parallelism, (2) interactive-speed visualization of large-scale trace
dependencies, (3) interactive-speed visualization of code
interactions, and (4) a BDD variable ordering for BDD-compressed
traces that results in fast visualization, fast analysis, and good
compression. ParaMeter's effectiveness is demonstrated by finding and
exploiting parallelism in 175.vpr. Measurements of ParaMeter's
visualization algorithms show that they are up to seventy-five thousand
times faster than prior approaches.