Articles

Compile-Time Analysis and Specialization of Clocks in Concurrent Programs

Vasudevan, Nalini; Tardieu, Olivier; Dolby, Julian; Edwards, Stephen A.

Clocks are a mechanism for providing synchronization barriers in concurrent programming languages. They are usually implemented using primitive communication mechanisms and thus spare the programmer from reasoning about low-level implementation details such as remote procedure calls and error conditions. Clocks provide flexibility, but programs often use them in specific ways that do not require their full implementation. In this paper, we describe a tool that mitigates the overhead of general-purpose clocks by statically analyzing how programs use them and choosing optimized implementations when available. We tackle the clock implementation in the standard library of the X10 programming language—a parallel, distributed object-oriented language. We report our findings for a small set of analyses and benchmarks. Our tool only adds a few seconds to analysis time, making it practical to use as part of a compilation chain.

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Also Published In

Title
Compiler Construction: 18th International Conference, CC 2009, Held as Part of the Joint European Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2009, York, UK, March 22-29, 2009: Proceedings
Publisher
Springer
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00722-4_5

More About This Work

Academic Units
Computer Science
Series
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 5501
Published Here
August 24, 2011