Plenary Lecture

Non-Linear Symbolic Program Analysis for Increased Parallelization

Prof. Kleanthis Psarris
Department of Computer Science
The University of Texas at San Antonio
San Antonio, TX 78249
E-mail: psarris@cs.utsa.edu

Abstract: High end parallel and multi-core processors rely on compilers to perform the necessary optimizations and exploit concurrency in order to achieve higher performance. However, source code for high performance computers is extremely complex to analyze and optimize. In particular, program analysis techniques often do not take into account complex expressions during the data dependence analysis phase. Most data dependence tests are only able to analyze linear expressions, even though non-linear expressions occur very often in practice. Therefore, considerable amounts of potential parallelism remain unexploited. In this work we propose new data dependence analysis techniques to handle such complex instances of the dependence problem and increase program parallelization. Our method is based on a set of polynomial time techniques that can prove or disprove dependences in source codes with non-linear and symbolic expressions, complex loop bounds, arrays with coupled subscripts, and if-statement constraints. In addition our algorithm can produce accurate and complete direction vector information, enabling the compiler to apply further transformations. To validate our method we performed an experimental evaluation and comparison against the I-Test, the Omega test and the Range test in the Perfect and SPEC benchmarks. The experimental results indicate that our dependence analysis tool is accurate, efficient and more effective in program parallelization than the other dependence tests. The improved parallelization results into higher speedups and better program execution performance in several benchmarks.

Brief Biography of the Speaker:
Kleanthis Psarris received his B.S. degree in Mathematics from the National University of Athens, Greece in 1984. He received his M.S. degree in Computer Science in 1987, his M.Eng. degree in Electrical Engineering in 1989 and his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 1991, all from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. He is currently a Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His research interests are in the areas of Parallel and Distributed Systems, Compilers and Programming Languages. He has published extensively in top journals and conferences and his research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and Department of Defense agencies. He is an Editor of the WSEAS Transactions on Information Science and Applications and an Associate Editor of the Parallel Computing journal. He has served on the Program Committees of several international conferences including the ACM International Conference on Supercomputing in 1995, 2000 and 2006 and the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing in 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006. He is a member of ACM and a Senior Member of IEEE.