HAWKEYE: effective discovery of dataflow impediments to parallelization

Abstract

Parallelization transformations are an important vehicle for improving the performance and scalability of a software system. Utilizing concurrency requires that the developer first identify a suitable parallelization scope: one that poses as a performance bottleneck, and at the same time, exhibits considerable available parallelism. However, having identified a candidate scope, the developer still needs to ensure the correctness of the transformation. This is a difficult undertaking, where a major source of complication lies in tracking down sequential dependencies that inhibit parallelization and addressing them.