Automatically exploiting implicit parallelism in Java

Abstract

In this paper we show how implicit parallelism in Java programs can be made explicit by a restructuring compiler using the multi-threading mechanism of the language. In particular, we focus on automatically exploiting implicit parallelism in loops and multi-way recursive methods. Expressing parallelism in Java itself clearly has the advantage that the transformed program remains portable. After compilation of the transformed Java program into byte-code, speedup can be obtained on any platform on which the Java byte-code interpreter supports the true parallel execution of threads. Moreover, we will see that the transformations presented in this paper only induce a slight overhead on uni-processors. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.