Software Caching and Computation Migration in Olden

Abstract:

The goal of the Olden project is to build a system that
provides parallelism for general purpose C programs with minimal
programmer annotations. We focus on programs using dynamic structures
such as trees, lists, and DAGs. We demonstrate that providing both
software caching and computation migration can improve the performance
of these programs, and provide a compile-time heuristic that selects
between them for each pointer dereference. We have implemented a
prototype system on the Thinking Machines CM-5. We describe our
implementation and report on experiments with ten benchmarks.