Programming Shared Memory Multiprocessors with Deterministic Message-Passing Concurrency: Compiling SHIM to Pthreads

Author

Edwards, Stephen A. ; Vasudevan, Nalini ; Tardieu, Olivier

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci., Columbia Univ., New York, NY

fYear

2008

fDate

10-14 March 2008

Firstpage

1498

Lastpage

1503

Abstract

Multicore shared-memory architectures are becoming prevalent and bring many programming challenges. Among the biggest are data races: accesses to shared resources that make a program´s behavior depend on scheduling decisions beyond its control. To eliminate such races, the SHIM concurrent programming language adopts deterministic message passing as it sole communication mechanism. We demonstrate such language restrictions are practical by presenting a SHIM to C-plus-Pthreads compiler that can produce efficient code for shared-memory multiprocessors. We present a parallel JPEG decoder and FFT exhibiting 3.05 and 3.3times speedups on a four-core processor.

Keywords

concurrency control; message passing; multi-threading; parallelising compilers; processor scheduling; shared memory systems; C-plus-Pthreads compiler; FFT; SHIM concurrent programming language; deterministic message-passing concurrency; four-core processor; language restrictions; multicore shared-memory architectures; parallel JPEG decoder; scheduling decisions; shared memory multiprocessors; Computer architecture; Computer languages; Computer science; Concurrent computing; Decoding; Health information management; Multicore processing; Processor scheduling; Programming profession; Testing;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Design, Automation and Test in Europe, 2008. DATE '08

Conference_Location

Munich

Print_ISBN

978-3-9810801-3-1

Electronic_ISBN

978-3-9810801-4-8

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/DATE.2008.4484886

Filename

4484886