The HELIX project: Overview and directions

Parallelism has become the primary way to maximize processor performance and power efficiency. But because creating parallel programs by hand is difficult and prone to error, there is an urgent need for automatic ways of transforming conventional programs to exploit modern multicore systems. The HELIX compiler transformation is one such technique that has proven effective at parallelizing individual sequential programs automatically for a real six-core processor. We describe that transformation in the context of the broader HELIX research project, which aims to optimize the throughput of a multicore processor by coordinated changes in its architecture, its compiler, and its operating system. The goal is to make automatic parallelization mainstream in multiprogramming settings through adaptive algorithms for extracting and tuning thread-level parallelism.