Tile reduction: The first step towards tile aware parallelization in OpenMP

Abstract

Tiling is widely used by compilers and programmer to optimize scientific and engineering code for better performance. Many parallel programming languages support tile/tiling directly through first-class language constructs or library routines. However, the current OpenMP programming language is tile oblivious, although it is the de facto standard for writing parallel programs on shared memory systems. In this paper, we introduce tile aware parallelization into OpenMP. We propose tile reduction, an OpenMP tile aware parallelization technique that allows reduction to be performed on multi-dimensional arrays. The paper has three contributions: (a) it is the first paper that proposes and discusses tile aware parallelization in OpenMP. We argue that, it is not only necessary but also possible to have tile aware parallelization in OpenMP; (b) the paper introduces the methods used to implement tile reduction, including the required OpenMP API extension and the associated code generation techniques; (c) we have applied tile reduction on a set of benchmarks. The experimental results show that tile reduction can make parallelization more natural and flexible. It not only can expose more parallelism in a program, but also can improve its data locality. © 2009 Springer.