Supporting speculative parallelization in the presence of dynamic data structures

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

The availability of multicore processors has led to significant interest in compiler techniques for speculative parallelization of sequential programs. Isolation of speculative state from non-speculative state forms the basis of such speculative techniques as this separation enables recovery from misspeculations. In our prior work on CorD [35,36] we showed that for array and scalar variable based programs copying of data between speculative and non-speculative memory can be highly optimized to support state separation that yields significant speedups on multicore machines available today. However, we observe that in context of heap-intensive programs that operate on linked dynamic data structures, state separation based speculative parallelization poses many challenges. The copying of data structures from non-speculative to speculative state (copy-in operation) can be very expensive due to the large sizes of dynamic data structures. The copying of updated data structures from speculative state to non-speculative state (copy-out operation) is made complex due to the changes in the shape and size of the dynamic data structure made by the speculative computation. In addition, we must contend with the need to translate pointers internal to dynamic data structures between their non-speculative and speculative memory addresses. In this paper we develop an augmented design for the representation of dynamic data structures such that all of the above operations can be performed efficiently. Our experiments demonstrate significant speedups on a real machine for a set of programs that make extensive use of heap based dynamic data structures.