Manipulating Visualization, Not Codes

Oleksandr Zinenko (1, 2) , Cédric Bastoul (3, 4) , Stéphane Huot (5)

1 LRI - Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique
2 EX-SITU - Extreme Interaction
3 ICube - Laboratoire des sciences de l'ingénieur, de l'informatique et de l'imagerie
4 CAMUS - Compilation pour les Architectures MUlti-coeurS
5 MJOLNIR - Computing tools to empower users

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.

Domains: Human-Computer Interaction [cs.HC]; Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing [cs.DC]; Performance [cs.PF]

Oleksandr Zinenko, Cédric Bastoul, Stéphane Huot. Manipulating Visualization, Not Codes. International Workshop on Polyhedral Compilation Techniques (IMPACT), Jan 2015, Amsterdam, Netherlands. pp.8. ⟨hal-01100974⟩