Visualizing Potential Parallelism in Sequential Programs

This paper presents ParaMeter, an interactive program analysis and visualization system for large traces. Using ParaMeter, a software developer can locate and analyze regions of code that may yield to parallelization efforts and to possibly extract performance from multicore hardware. The key contributions in the paper are (1) a method to use interactive visualization of traces to find and exploit parallelism, (2) interactive-speed visualization of large-scale trace dependencies, (3) interactive-speed visualization of code interactions, and (4) a BDD variable ordering for BDD-compressed traces that results in fast visualization, fast analysis, and good compression. ParaMeter's effectiveness is demonstrated by finding and exploiting parallelism in 175.vpr. Measurements of ParaMeter's visualization algorithms show that they are up to seventy-five thousand times faster than prior approaches.