Performance Optimization using Critical Path Analysis in Multithreaded Programs on Multiprocessors

Efficient performance tuning of parallel programs is often hard. Optimization is often done when the program is written as a last effort to increase the performance. With sequential programs each (executed) code segment will affect the total execution time of the program. Thus, any code segment that is optimized in a sequential program will decrease the execution time. In the case of a parallel program executed on a multiprocessor this is not always true. This is due to dependencies between the different threads. As a result, certain code segments of the execution may not affect the total execution time of the program. Thus, optimization of such code segments will not increase the performance. In this paper we present a new approach to perform the optimization phase. Our approach finds the critical path of the multithreaded program and the optimization is only done on those specific code segments of the program. We have implemented the critical path analysis in a performance optimization tool. 1