High-Level Language Extensions for Fast Execution of Pipeline-Parallelized Code on Current Chip Multi-Processor Systems

The last few years have seen multicore architectures emerge as the defining technology shaping the future of high-performance computing. Although multicore architectures present tremendous performance potential, to realize the true potential of these systems, software needs to play a key role. In particular, high-level language abstractions and the compiler and the operating system should be able to exploit the on-chip parallelism and utilize underlying hardware resources on these emerging platforms. This paper presents a set of high-level abstractions that allow the programmer to specify, at the source-code level, a variety to of parameters related to parallelism and inter-thread data locality. These abstractions are implemented as extensions to both C and Fortran. We present the syntax of these directives and also discuss their implementation in the context of source-to-source transformation framework and autotuning system. The abstractions are particularly applicable to pipeline parallelized code. We demonstrate the effectiveness of these strategies of a set of pipeline parallel benchmarks on three different multicore platforms