Cross-Paradigm Compilation across Programming Models: from Imperative to Asynchronous Graph

Abstract

Recent years have seen a rapid evolution in multi-core processor architectures. However, programming multi-core processors efficiently is a challenging endeavor [1], [2]. Either programmers empirically or ad hoc identify parallelization opportunities in their sequential code, then manually parallelize the implementation, or parallel programming paradigms (with appropriate tooling and support) must be employed to automate parallelization efforts. Despite encouraging efforts such as OpenMP [3] and OpenCL[4], we are far from automated parallelization.Asynchronous Graph Programming (AGP) is a novel parallel paradigm that is amenable to automated parallelization for multi-core processors. However, its semantics are both foreign to most programmers, and too low-level to support software development at scale. Thus, this thesis explores the development of a cross-paradigm compiler, that can translate code in an imperative language (C) to AGP, allowing existing code-bases to be re-deployed and automatically parallelized, despite the semantics of their original language being sequential. Towards this, we define semantic transformations from (a sub-set of) C to AGP, and demonstrate the implementation of a compiler that implements those transformations. Our results show that it is indeed possible to transform C code into AGP code, and that transformed parallel implementations running on a multi-core system, for a suite of testing benchmarks, i outperform sequential code substantially.First and foremost, I am grateful to Almighty God for leading me down the path of knowledge. I would like to express my deep and sincere gratitude to my research supervisor, Dr. Paulo Garcia for giving me the opportunity to do research and providing invaluable guidance throughout this research. I can't say thank you enough for his tremendous support and help. In every meeting we had together, I have been inspired by his continuance support, patience, and guidance which was vital for the completion of this project. I appreciate his help throughout the whole thesis at times when he was trying to put me in the right path. Special thanks to students of our research group for their valuable comments and suggestions especially to Sebastien with whom I have worked for a period of time before our thesis begins. I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my parents and my brother and sister, for their wise counsel and widespread support throughout my study in Canada. I would like to thank my fiance, Soroush, who has been supporting me all the time and he has always been source of inspiration and strength for me. Finally, I would like to thank my friends, Amirali, Parnia and Jasmine, for providing me with happy distractions to rest my mind outside of my research and having a group study sessions together on campus.

Arch-Lang : A DSE Tool for Flexible Hardware/Software Co-Design

“…[35] proposes a tool that analyzes source code to automatically identify sections that can be parallelized and annotates them with OpenMP annotations. Similarly, [50] converts sequential C code into a CUDA-compatible program that can be accelerated by a GPU with CUDA cores, and [36] proposes a compiler that completely translates a program written in a compatible subset of C into a program expressed in a graph-based paradigm known as Asynchronous Graph Programming (AGP) [51].…”