Institute for Computing Systems ArchitectureThis work presents an automatic cost-analysis system for an implicitly parallel skeletal
programming language.
Although deducing interesting dynamic characteristics of parallel programs (and in
particular, run time) is well known to be an intractable problem in the general case, it
can be alleviated by placing restrictions upon the programs which can be expressed.
By combining two research threads, the “skeletal” and “shapely” paradigms which
take this route, we produce a completely automated, computation and communication
sensitive cost analysis system. This builds on earlier work in the area by quantifying
communication as well as computation costs, with the former being derived for the
Bulk Synchronous Parallel (BSP) model.
We present details of our shapely skeletal language and its BSP implementation strategy
together with an account of the analysis mechanism by which program behaviour
information (such as shape and cost) is statically deduced. This information can be
used at compile-time to optimise a BSP implementation and to analyse computation
and communication costs. The analysis has been implemented in Haskell. We consider
different algorithms expressed in our language for some example problems and
illustrate each BSP implementation, contrasting the analysis of their efficiency by traditional,
intuitive methods with that achieved by our cost calculator. The accuracy of
cost predictions by our cost calculator against the run time of real parallel programs is
tested experimentally.
Previous shape-based cost analysis required all elements of a vector (our nestable bulk
data structure) to have the same shape. We partially relax this strict requirement on data
structure regularity by introducing new shape expressions in our analysis framework.
We demonstrate that this allows us to achieve the first automated analysis of a complete
derivation, the well known maximum segment sum algorithm of Skillicorn and Cai
