Parallelware Tools: An Experimental Evaluation on POWER Systems

TL;DR

This paper evaluates Parallelware tools' effectiveness in detecting concurrency issues, discovering parallelization opportunities, and generating optimized parallel code for POWER systems, aiming to improve the quality and performance of parallel software.

Contribution

It provides an experimental assessment of Parallelware's capabilities in static analysis for parallel software development on POWER systems, highlighting its potential benefits.

Findings

Effective detection of concurrency issues

Identification of new parallelization opportunities

Generation of faster parallel-equivalent code

Abstract

Static code analysis tools are designed to aid software developers to build better quality software in less time, by detecting defects early in the software development life cycle. Even the most experienced developer regularly introduces coding defects. Identifying, mitigating and resolving defects is an essential part of the software development process, but frequently defects can go undetected. One defect can lead to a minor malfunction or cause serious security and safety issues. This is magnified in the development of the complex parallel software required to exploit modern heterogeneous multicore hardware. Thus, there is an urgent need for new static code analysis tools to help in building better concurrent and parallel software. The paper reports preliminary results about the use of Appentra's Parallelware technology to address this problem from the following three perspectives: finding concurrency issues in the code, discovering new opportunities for parallelization in the code, and generating parallel-equivalent codes that enable tasks to run faster. The paper also presents experimental results using well-known scientific codes and POWER systems.