A Refactoring Approach to Parallelism

Abstract

In the multicore era, a major programming task will be to make programs more parallel. This is tedious because it requires changing many lines of code, and it is error-prone and non-trivial because programmers need to ensure non-interference of parallel operations. Fortunately, refactoring tools can help reduce the analysis and transformation burden.

We present our vision on how refactoring tools can improve programmer productivity, program performance, and program portability. We also present the current incarnation of this vision: a toolset that supports several refactorings for (i) making programs thread-safe, (ii) threading sequential programs for throughput, and (iii) improving scalability of parallel programs.