Paralysis: An Extensible Multi-tiered Guidance Environment for Program Parallelization and Analysis

The heterogeneous computing revolution continues unabated. Yet despite the vast number of naïve users in possession of bespoke software hoping to embrace the opportunities that this revolution has wrought, few approaches proposed in current literature can guide such users in these efforts. The most appropriate choice would appear to be a (semi-)automating compiler. However, these typically target a single device-type and demand the unguided use of directives. Consequently, they are of little use when naïve users are seeking answers to more fundamental questions, such as: which fragments of a program can/should be parallelized, which device should each fragment target, and what speedup will be attained. To this end, this paper expands on previous work and proposes Paralysis - an extensible guidance environment, tiered for varying programmer competencies with support for static and dynamic analysis techniques. At the highest level, guided user experiences are paramount. At the lowest level, underlying functionality is exposed as a set of plug-ins, ensuring longevity. A partial prototype, built atop the Cetus infrastructure, is described. It is used to analyze two serial programs for CUDA execution - the DFT and the Box Blur Filter. Speedups of 15x and 22x are achieved on the basis of the analysis.