Rethinking Parallel Execution, Architecture, and Software

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Computing today is at a critical juncture as processors move away from uniprocessors to multicore processors. Without innovations in how to writeprograms to make use of multiple processing cores, software vendors will no longer have access to increasing processing performance, a phenomenon that has driven the growth of the computer industry for over four decades. Realizing the enormity of the situation many leaders have put parallel computing high on their list of critical research issues and many researchers are trying to build on four decades of knowledge to make progress in this critical area. This research is investigating a novel approach to attacking this critical problem, one that is counter to much of the prevailing wisdom on parallel execution. The approach couples widely used sequential programrepresentations with a novel dynamic parallel execution model to achieve parallel execution. Initial experience with this new approach has been very promising: it can achieve parallelism comparable to, and sometimes better than, applications parallelized with traditional techniques, but can do so without the drawbacks of the traditional techniques. This work investigates the applicability and effectiveness of this new approach for a variety of problem areas, including database, networking, and embedded applications. The work will also investigate the impact of the novel parallel execution model on the design of processors and chip multiprocessors. Broader impacts include a potential transformation in how a variety of important application programs are written for parallel execution on multicore processors and the consequent design of such processors.