Management of heterogeneous parallelism on shared memory multiprocessors

Heterogeneous parallelism includes all forms of inter-instruction parallelism. This may include both explicitly coded and compiler generated forms. It is argued that support mechanisms are needed to efficiently manage heterogeneous subcomputations at run-time, and that the important issues in the design and implementation of these mechanisms are different from those previously studied for support of loop-level parallelism. An empirical study of an actual application is presented. The study was based on variational recursive dynamics simulation of a typical four wheel vehicle. The results of the empirical study indicate that the choice of an appropriate run-time parallel processing support mechanism can have a dramatic impact upon the ability to successfully extract heterogeneous parallelism for programs. In particular, the efficiency (lack of overhead) of the support mechanisms becomes critically important as the granularity of subcomputations becomes relatively fine. The use of simple, syntactically closed constructs is suggested.<>