Seminars & Events

Mathematics and Computer Science Division
"Interactive Refactoring for Parallelism"

DATE: April 2, 2012 to April 2, 2012
TIME: 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
SPEAKER: Danny Dig, Research Professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
LOCATION: Building 240, TCS Conference rooms 1404 & 1405, Argonne National Laboratory
HOST: Rajeev Thakur

Description:
Parallelizing existing sequential programs to run efficiently on multicores is hard. Despite the continuous advances on auto-parallelizing compilers, most of the code is parallelized manually. Interactive tools take a completely different approach: sometimes, less automation is better! They let the programmer be in the driver's seat. The programmer is the expert on the problem domain, and so understands the domain concepts amenable to parallelism.

This talk describes our interactive toolset that enables programmers to refactor sequential code into parallel code that uses the Java concurrent libraries. Our growing toolset supports data parallelism, task parallelism, and concurrent collections. These automated refactorings do not require any program annotations, yet the transformations span multiple, non-adjacent, program statements and require control- and data-flow analysis. Empirical evaluation shows
that our toolset is useful: it reduces the burden of analyzing and rewriting code, it is fast enough to be used interac tively, and it correctly identifies and applies transformations that open-source developers overlooked.

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