Attribute grammar genetic programming algorithm for automatic code parallelization

Abstract

A method is presented for evolving individuals that use an Attribute Grammar (AG) in a generative way. AGs are considerably more flexible and powerful than the closed, context free grammars normally employed by GP. Rather than evolving derivation trees as in most approaches, we employ a two step process that first generates a vector of real numbers using standard GP, before using the vector to produce a parse tree. As the parse tree is being produced, the choices in the grammar depend on the attributes being input to the current node of the parse tree. The motivation is automatic parallelization or the discovery of a re-factoring of a sequential code or equivalent parallel code that satisfies certain performance gains when implemented on a target parallel computing platform such as a multicore processor. An illustrative and a computed example demonstrate this methodology. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.