[Colloq] Thesis Defense by Xin Dong

[Nicole Bekerian]

The College of Computer and Information Science Presents:

Date: Monday, December 12, 2011
Time: 10:30AM
Place: WVH 366

Thesis Defense
Title:  Source-Level Transformation of Legacy Sequential Program into Scalable Thread-Parallel Code
Speaker: Xin Dong
Advisor:  Gene Cooperman

Abstract:

This dissertation will focus on code transformation for legacy sequential programs toward thread-level parallelism on many-core computers.  It highlights a semi-automatic method: Scalable Task-Oriented Code Transformation (STOCT).  STOCT introduces thread parallelism for sequential code via a series of code transformation steps.  STOCT’s goal is: Given a large C/C++ software program, transform the source code to replace several independent copies of a sequential process with an equivalent single process consisting of several threads.  This takes advantage of many-core computers in a memory-efficient and scalable manner.

The STOCT methodology is implemented in the parallelization work for three widely varying applications:  (i) a simulation toolkit Geant4; (ii) a linear system solver based on ILU(k) preconditioning; and (iii) a large-scale data analysis tool AliRoot. STOCT bridges the gap from sequential programming to concurrent programming by decomposing the parallelization into four subgoals:  to exert more parallelism, to share more data, to guarantee correctness, and to achieve scalability.

STOCT has the following features:  (i) to pursue thread safety by maximal parallelism in which only the minimal shared data set is allowed; (ii) to reduce memory footprint by sharing some user-level data whose value is no longer changed after initialization; (iii) to guarantee runtime correctness, which is weaker and yet strong enough for production runs; and (iv) to achieve scalability by eliminating two serious performance bottlenecks special for shared-memory computation: memory allocation/deallocation and cache coherence miss.


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Best, 
Nicole 

______________________________________________________________ 

Nicole Bekerian 
Administrative Assistant 

Northeastern University 
College of Computer and Information Science 
360 Huntington Ave. 
202 West Village H 
Boston, MA 02115 

Phone: 617.373.2462 
Fax: 617.373.5121