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.