A Generic Approach to Efficiently Parallelize Legacy Sequential Software

Abstract

Multi-core processing units have been the answer to ever increasing demand of computational power of modern software. One of the main issues with the adoption of new hardware is portability of legacy software. In this specific case, in order for legacy sequential software to maximize the exploitation of the computational benefits brought by multi-core processors, it has to undergo a parallelization effort. Although there is a common agreement and well-specified support for parallelizing sequential algorithms, there is still a lack in supporting software engineers in identifying and assessing parallelization potentials in a legacy sequential application. In this work we provide a generic parallelization approach which supports the engineering in maximizing performance gain through parallelization while minimizing the cost of the parallelization effort. We evaluate the approach on an industrial use-case at ABB Robotics.