Symbolic performance prediction of speculative parallel programs

Abstract

Speculative parallelism refers to searching in parallel for a solution, such as finding a pattern in a data base, where finding the first solution terminates the whole parallel process. Different performance prediction methods are required as compared to traditional parallelism. In this paper we introduce an analytical approach to predict the execution time distribution of data-dependent parallel programs that feature Nary and binary speculative parallel compositions. The method is based on the use of statistical moments which allows program execution time distribution to be approximated at O(1) solution complexity. Measurement results for synthetic distributions indicate an accuracy that lies in the percent range while for empirical distributions on internet search engines the prediction accuracy is acceptable, provided sufficient workload unimodality. © Springer-Verlag 2003.