Exploiting Multicore Parallelism with Dynamic Instrumentation and Compilation

Abstract

The emerging multicore era has brought many opportunities and challenges to systems research. Two of the challenges I have been focusing on are (i) how to provide detailed analysis of parallel programs and (ii) how to map computations in a parallel program to the underlying hardware in order to achieve the optimal performance.

For (i), we have developed the Pin dynamic instrumentation system, which has become very popular for writing architectural and program analysis tools. By inserting instrumentation codes on the fly, Pin can perform fine-grain monitoring of the architectural state of a program. As an example, I will discuss a parallel programming tool called Thread Checker which we built with Pin for detecting common parallel programming bugs like data races and deadlocks. I will also discuss the dynamic compilation techniques behind Pin. In addition, I will present an extension of Pin called PinOS, which performs whole-system instrumentation (i.e. including both OS and applications) by using virtualization techniques.

For (ii), I have developed the Qilin parallel programming system, which exploits the hardware parallelism available on machines with a multicore CPU and a GPU. Qilin provides a C++ API for writing data-parallel operations so that the compiler is alleviated from the difficult job of extracting parallelism from serial code. At runtime, the Qilin compiler automatically partitions these API calls into tasks and maps these tasks to the underlying hardware using an adaptive algorithm. Preliminary results show that our parallel system can achieve significant speedups (above 10x) over the serial case for some important computation kernels.

At the end, I will outline my future works in parallel programming, compilation, and virtualization.

Speaker Biography

Chi-Keung (CK) Luk is currently a Senior Staff Researcher in the Software Pathfinding and Innovation Group at Intel, where he conducts research and advanced development in parallel programming, dynamic compilation, computer architecture, program analysis tools, and virtualization. Most recently, he has founded the Qilin parallel programming system project and the PinOS whole-system instrumentation project. He was also a core developer of both the Pin dynamic instrumentation system and the Ispike Itanium binary optimizer.

CK obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, under the supervision of Todd Mowry. He also spent two years as a visiting scholar at Carnegie Mellon University. He has over 20 publications and one issued patent with another five pending. He has served on the program committees of WBIA’05, MSP’02, and MICRO’01.

Among the honors CK received, he is most proud of the Intel Achievement Award---the most prestigious award at Intel---he received in 2008 for his contributions to Pin, and the nomination for the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award in 2000.