Making Large Legacy Software Run Twice as Fast on a Quad-Core with Just 1 Month of Programmer Effort

Опубликовано 6 сентября 2016, 18:45

A major challenge of the industry-wide shift to multicore processing is what to do with large legacy software that was not written with parallelism in mind. Ideally, the transition from sequential to parallel code would involve zero programmer effort: e.g., it would be handled automatically by a parallelizing compiler. In practice, however, this ideal remains beyond the scope of today's compiler technology for most applications. For complex applications that were developed by large teams over many years, the cost of rewriting key parts of the software nearly from scratch to introduce parallelism is prohibitively expensive. Fortunately, there is a secret