MacShim: Compiling MATLAB to a Scheduling-Independent Concurrent Language

Nondeterminism is a central challenge in most concurrent models of computation. That programmers must worry about races and other timing-dependent behavior is a key reason that parallel programming has not been widely adopted. The SHIM concurrent language, intended for hardware/software codesign applications, avoids this problem by providing deterministic (race-free) concurrency, but does not support automatic parallelization of sequential algorithms. In this paper, we present a compiler able to parallelize a simple MATLAB-like language into concurrent SHIM processes. From a user-provided partitioning of arrays to processes, our compiler divides the program into coarse-grained processes and schedules and synthesizes inter-process communication. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on some image-processing algorithms