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Modern programming languages offer special syntax and semantics for logical fork-join parallelism in the form of parallel loops, allowing them to be nested, e.g., a parallel loop within another parallel loop. This expressiveness comes at a price, however: on modern multicore systems, realizing logical parallelism results in overheads due to the creation and management of parallel tasks, which can wipe out the benefits of parallelism. Today, we expect application programmers to cope with it by manually tuning and optimizing their code. Such tuning requires programmers to reason about architectural factors hidden behind layers of software abstractions, such as task scheduling and load balancing. Managing these factors is particularly challenging when workloads are irregular because their performance is input-sensitive. This paper presents HBC, the first compiler that translates C/C++ programs with high-level, fork-join constructs (e.g., OpenMP) to binaries capable of automatically controlling the cost of parallelism and dealing with irregular, input-sensitive workloads. The basis of our approach is Heartbeat Scheduling, a recent proposal for automatic granularity control, which is backed by formal guarantees on performance. HBC binaries outperform OpenMP binaries for workloads for which even entirely manual solutions struggle to find the right balance between parallelism and its costs.
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Veracity: declarative multicore programming with commutativity
There is an ongoing effort to provide programming abstractions that ease the burden of exploiting multicore hardware. Many programming abstractions (e.g., concurrent objects, transactional memory, etc.) simplify matters, but still involve intricate engineering. We argue that some difficulty of multicore programming can be meliorated through a declarative programming style in which programmers directly express the independence of fragments of sequential programs. In our proposed paradigm, programmers write programs in a familiar, sequential manner, with the added ability to explicitly express the conditions under which code fragments sequentially commute. Putting such commutativity conditions into source code offers a new entry point for a compiler to exploit the known connection between commutativity and parallelism. We give a semantics for the programmer’s sequential perspective and, under a correctness condition, find that a compiler-transformed parallel execution is equivalent to the sequential semantics. Serializability/linearizability are not the right fit for this condition, so we introduce scoped serializability and show how it can be enforced with lock synthesis techniques. We next describe a technique for automatically verifying and synthesizing commute conditions via a new reduction from our commute blocks to logical specifications, upon which symbolic commutativity reasoning can be performed. We implemented our work in a new language called Veracity, implemented in Multicore OCaml. We show that commutativity conditions can be automatically generated across a variety of new benchmark programs, confirm the expectation that concurrency speedups can be seen as the computation increases, and apply our work to a small in-memory filesystem and an adaptation of a crowdfund blockchain smart contract.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2008633
- PAR ID:
- 10603352
- Publisher / Repository:
- Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
- Volume:
- 6
- Issue:
- OOPSLA2
- ISSN:
- 2475-1421
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 1726-1756
- Size(s):
- p. 1726-1756
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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