Program Transformation to Identify List-Based Parallel Skeletons

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to automatically transform programs into list-based forms to facilitate parallelization with existing skeletons, reducing inefficiencies and broadening applicability.

Contribution

It proposes a novel transformation technique that converts arbitrary programs into list-based forms, enabling easier parallel execution with existing skeleton libraries.

Findings

Transforms programs to list-based forms for parallelism

Reduces inefficient intermediate data structures

Enhances compatibility with existing skeletons

Abstract

Algorithmic skeletons are used as building-blocks to ease the task of parallel programming by abstracting the details of parallel implementation from the developer. Most existing libraries provide implementations of skeletons that are defined over flat data types such as lists or arrays. However, skeleton-based parallel programming is still very challenging as it requires intricate analysis of the underlying algorithm and often uses inefficient intermediate data structures. Further, the algorithmic structure of a given program may not match those of list-based skeletons. In this paper, we present a method to automatically transform any given program to one that is defined over a list and is more likely to contain instances of list-based skeletons. This facilitates the parallel execution of a transformed program using existing implementations of list-based parallel skeletons. Further, by using an existing transformation called distillation in conjunction with our method, we produce transformed programs that contain fewer inefficient intermediate data structures.