Parallelizing Bzip2: A Case Study in Multicore Software Engineering

  • Tagung:

    Zeitschriftenartikel 

  • Autoren:

    Victor Pankratius
    Ali Jannesari
    Walter F. Tichy

  • Summary

    As multicore computers become mainstream and the demand for parallel software increases, software developers need to know which approaches to parallelism work. A case study in which four teams competitively parallelized the Bzip2 compression algorithm illustrates the difficulties that arise when working with a nonnumeric, real application. The sequential code needed significant restructuring before parallelization could begin restructuring consumed most of the development time. Parallelization at a high level resulted in significant speedups. Low-level, inner-loop parallelizations performed poorly. The case study yielded several other lessons learned.

Bibtex

@article{,
author={Victor Pankratius, Ali Jannesari, Walter F. Tichy},
title={Parallelizing Bzip2: A Case Study in Multicore Software Engineering},
year=2009,
month=Nov,
publisher={IEEE Computer Society},
volume={26},
abstract={As multicore computers become mainstream and the demand for parallel software increases, software developers need to know which approaches to parallelism work. A case study in which four teams competitively parallelized the Bzip2 compression algorithm illustrates the difficulties that arise when working with a nonnumeric, real application. The sequential code needed significant restructuring before parallelization could begin restructuring consumed most of the development time. Parallelization at a high level resulted in significant speedups. Low-level, inner-loop parallelizations performed poorly. The case study yielded several other lessons learned.},
number={6},
pages={70-77},
journal={IEEE Software},
note={Download: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MS.2009.183},