The Potential of Exploiting Coarse-Grain Task Parallelism from Sequential Programs

. Research into automatic extraction of instruction-level parallelism and data parallelism from sequential languages by compilers has been going on for many years. However, task parallelism has been almost unexploited by parallelizing compilers. It has been shown that coarse-grain task parallelism is a useful additional resource of parallelism for multiprocessors, but the simple and restricted execution models of the automatic compilers have resulted into poor performance figures. This paper presents experimental results used to evaluate the available coarse-grain (procedure based) task parallelism in a set of C benchmarks assuming different machine models, ranging from very basic to extreme complex. The experiments show reasonable potential for machines which support both fast data communication and complex control synchronization. 1 Introduction The automatic exploitation of parallelism from sequential programs has been focused on instruction-level parallelism and data parallelism f..