Coarse-Grained Parallelism Using Metaobject Protocols

Abstract


Currently, there exist different approaches to parallelizing a computation at a coarse-grain. One approach is to parallelize a computation by placing compiler declarations in the source code. This approach makes it possible to conceptually separate the code describing a computation from the code (i.e. declarations) describing its parallelization. This approach also makes it possible to explicitly control a computation's parallelization, thereby providing an opportunity to increase the computation's performance. However, there are cases when it is not reasonable to expect a desired mechanism for concurrency to be supported by the available, and fixed set of declarations, such as when the desired mechanism is highly specialized to a given computation and target architecture. In these cases, the declaration-based approach fails. In this thesis, we demonstrate that mops can solve this problem. Under the metaobject protocol approach, a computation is parallelized by marking source code expressions with marks supported by the compiler. Marks, like declarations, are used to separate a computation from its parallelization. When the supported marks can not be used to express a desired mechanism for concurrency, the metaobject protocol is used to incrementally augment the compiler's parallelization strategy to support the desired mechanism. The metaobject protocol is a model of the compiler's parallelization strategy that provides the knowledge necessary to augment the strategy incrementally, without exposing arbitrary or irrelevant implementation details. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the metaobject protocol-based approach, we present Anibus, a metaobject protocol-based compiler. We give several examples of using marks, and of incrementally augmenting Anibus's parallelization strategy. The examples include two implementations of the n-body gravity problem.


Go to Selected Papers page.