Citation

Oleksandr Zinenko, Cédric Bastoul, Stéphane Huot. Manipulating Visualization, Not Codes. International Workshop on Polyhedral Compilation Techniques (IMPACT), Jan 2015, Amsterdam, Netherlands. pp.8,

Abstract

Manual program parallelization and optimization may be necessary to reach a decent portion of the target architecture’s peak performance when automatic tools fail at choosing the best strategy. While a broad range of languages and libraries provide convenient ways to express parallelism, the difficult, time consuming and error-prone parallelism identification and extraction task is mostly left under the programmer’s responsibility. To address this issue, we introduce a visualization-based approach to ease parallelism extraction and expression that leverages polyhedral compilation technologies. Our interactive tool, Clint, maps direct manipulation of the visual representation to polyhedral program transformations with real-time semantics preservation feedback. We conducted two user studies showing that Clint’s visualization can be accurately understood by both experts and non-expert programmers, and that the parallelism can be extracted better from Clint’s representation than from the source code in many cases.