With the industry trend towards multi-core chip, we need to understand the practical issues faced by users who are porting large existing sequential software to a parallel platform. There is much literature on inventi...
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ISBN:
(纸本)1932415602
With the industry trend towards multi-core chip, we need to understand the practical issues faced by users who are porting large existing sequential software to a parallel platform. There is much literature on inventing, implementing and optimizing parallel algorithms. We study what a user needs in order to come up with an efficient parallel program, starting from a sequential application. We parallelized, debugged and optimized a large, public-domain ray-tracing code (POV-Ray). We built a performance tool to predict parallel POV-Ray's scalability on different platforms. The performance prediction tool and modeling was an important part of the optimization methodology because it guides the user's expectations on the potential benefits of more efforts to identify performance bottlenecks. We describe the steps in our POV-Ray work, and summarize potential relevant research issues. Even for a sequential algorithm which can be "embarrassingly parallelized", there is still much scope for further research to simplify the user's parallelization and optimization efforts.
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