Automatic Evolution of Parallel Sorting Programs on Multi-cores

Sorting algorithms that offer the potential for data-parallel execution on parallel architectures are an excellent tool for the current generation of multi-core processors that often require skilled parallelization knowledge to fully realize the potential of the hardware. We propose to automate the evolution of natively parallel programs using the Grammatical Evolution (GE) approach to utilise the computational potential of multi-cores. The proposed system, Multi-core Grammatical Evolution for Parallel Sorting (MCGE-PS), applies GE mapping along with explicit OpenMP #pragma compiler directives to automatically evolve data-level parallel iterative sorting algorithms. MCGE-PS is assessed on the generation of four non-recursive sorting programs in C. We show that it generated programs that can solve the problem that are also parallel. On a high performance Intel processor, MCGE-PS significantly reduced the execution time of the evolved programs for all the benchmark problems.