An Analytical Method for Parallelization of Recursive Functions

Abstract

Programming with parallel skeletons is an attractive framework because it encourages programmers to develop efficient and portable parallel programs. However, extracting parallelism from sequential specifications and constructing efficient parallel programs using the skeletons are still difficult tasks. In this paper, we propose an analytical approach to transforming recursive functions on general recursive data structures into compositions of parallel skeletons. Using static slicing, we have defined a classification of subexpressions based on their data-parallelism. Then, skeleton-based parallel programs are generated from the classification. To extend the scope of parallelization, we have adopted more general parallel skeletons which do not require the associativity of argument functions. In this way, our analytical method can parallelize recursive functions with complex data flows.