Parallelization of Utility Programs Based on Behavior
Phase Analysis
Xipeng Shen
Chen Ding{xshen,cding}@cs.rochester.edu
Computer Science Department, University of Rochester,Rochester, NY, USA 14627

Abstract. With the fast development of multi-core processors, automatic parallelization becomes increasingly important. In this work, we focus on the parallelization of utility programs, a class of commonly used applications including
compilers, transcoding utilities, file compressions, and databases. They take a series of requests as inputs and serve them one by one. Their high input dependence
poses a challenge to parallelization.
We use active profiling to find behavior phase boundaries and then automaticallydetect run-time dependences through profiling. Using a unified framework, we
manually parallelize programs at phase boundaries. We show that for two programs, the technique enables parallelization at large granularity, which may span
many loops and subroutines. The parallelized programs show significant speedup
on multi-processor machines.

1 Introduction
Nowadays due to the increasing complexity, it is difficult to improve the speed of highperformance uniprocessors. Chip multiprocessors is becoming the key of the next generation personal computers. But many applications, especially those running on past
personal computers, are sequential programs and require parallelization to benefit frommultiple cores.
In this paper, we describe a novel coarse-grain parallelization technique focused ona class of commonly used programs. Utility programs are a class of dynamic programs
whose behavior strongly depends on their input. The examples include compilers, interpreters, compressions, transcoding utilities and databases. The applications all provide
some sort of service: they accept, or can be configured to accept, a sequence of requests,
and each request is processed more-or-less independently of the others. Because their
behavior depend heavily on the input, utility applications display much less regular behavior than typical scientific programs. Many of them invoke many recursive function
calls.
Our parallelization is based on behavior-based phase analysis. Here we define behavior as the operations of a program, which changes from input to input. A behavior
phase is a unit of the recurring behavior in any execution. It may have plenty of loops
and function calls. We use active profiling and pattern recognition techniques to detect phases [7]. Each instance of the top-level phase is the processing of a request. For
example, the compilation of a function is a phase instance in GCC, and the parsing

of a sentence is a phase instance in Parser. The key observation is that the phases inutility programs coincide with program service periods and thus its memory usage periods. Operations inside a phase instance may have complex dependences but different
phase instances are usually independent or can be made independent. Therefore, phaseboundaries are good places to parallelize utility programs.
Phase-level parallelization has three steps. First, we automatically employ behaviorbased phase analysis to find phases and mark them in the program source code throughdebugging tools [7]. Secondly, we discover the run-time data dependences among phaseinstances through profiling. Finally, we parallelize the program under a unified framework. The last step is currently semi-automatic, and the correctness requires the verification of a programmer. The step can potentially be automated with run-time system
support, which automatically detects dependence violations and recovers when necessary. We have applied phase-level parallelization on two programs, Gzip and Parser andobtained up to 12.6 times speedup on a 16-processor machine.
There have been many efforts on automatic parallelization. Dynamic parallelization
was pioneered more than a decade ago [5, 10]. Many recent papers studied thread-level
speculation with hardware support ([2] contains a classification of various schemes).
Most of those methods exploit loop-level parallelism, especially in low-level loops.
Ortega et al. manually find parallelism in coarse loops for SPECInt benchmarks, which
they call distant parallelism [4]. Our technique exploits parallelism at phase granularity
for utility programs with some user support. It is orthogonal to fine-grain parallelism
techniques.

2 Parallelization Techniques
2.1

Phase Detection

Phase detection is to find the boundaries of recurring behavior patterns in a program.
We use a two-step technique to detect phases in utility programs. Active profiling uses
a sequence of identical requests to induce behavior that is both representative of normal
usage and sufficiently regular to identify outermost phases. It then uses different real
requests to capture common sub-phases and to verify the representativeness of the constructed input. The phase boundaries are determined through statistic analysis on the
dynamic basic block trace of the execution and are marked in the program code (see [7]for details.)
Phases have a hierarchical structure. In this study, we make use of the outermost
phases only. We use process-based parallelization, where each phase instance is executed by a child process. If phase instances are small, a process can execute a group ofphase instances at a time.
2.2

Phase-dependence Detection

Phase-dependence detection is to find run-time data dependences between phase instances during profiling runs. Similar to loop-dependence analysis[1], there are threekinds of phase-dependences: flow dependence, antidependence, and output dependence.

A flow dependence happens when a phase instance stores a value into a memory location and a later phase instance reads the value. An antidependence happens when aphase instance reads from and a later one writes to the same location. Finally, an output dependence happens when two phase instances write to the same memory location.
Since process-based parallelization creates a separate address space for different phaseinstances, we can ignore anti- and output dependences. In comparison, thread-based
parallelization must deal with them explicitly.
NODE∗ xlevel (NODE ∗ expr) { /∗ function definition ∗/if (++xltrace < TDEPTH){. . .} /∗ read and write xltrace ∗/- -xltrace;} /∗ read and write xltrace ∗/(a) False dependence due to implicit initializationchar∗buf;...
buf[i] = 0; /∗ both load and store operations due to byte operations∗/(b) Addressing false dependence∗u = ∗t; /∗ load value of ∗t ∗/...
(“t” is freed and “deletable” is allocated)
deletable[i][j] = FALSE; /∗ store operation∗/(deletable is freed)...
(c) Allocator false dependencefor (sym = getelement(array,i);. . .){. . . } /∗ load “array” element∗/
setelement (array, i, sym); /∗ store “array” element ∗/(d) Real phase dependence
Fig. 1. Example code of LI and Parser from the SPEC CPU2000 benchmark suite showing removable flow dependences. Each case contains a load from and a store to the same memory location.
The dependence flows from the store in each phase instance to the load of the next phase instance.

Most flow dependences among phases are removable. Here “removable” means thatthe flow dependence can be safely ignored in process-based parallelization. We divide
the removable flow dependences into three classes, give examples for each class, anddescribes the detection of these dependences as well as possible run-time support toguarantee correctness. As examples, Figure 1 shows fragments of the code of LI and
Parser in the SPEC CPU2000 benchmark suite. Figure 1 (a) shows the first class ofremovable dependence, which are caused by implicit initialization. In this case, thevariables are reset to their initial value at the end of each phase instance. In the example, the global variable xltrace is a stack pointer. It increments by 1 when evaluating
an expression and the evaluation function may call itself to evaluate subexpressions. It
decrements by 1 after the evaluation. It is always equal to -1, its initial value, at the beginning and the end of each phase instance. Such objects can be automatically detectedby checking the consistency of their values at the beginning of every phase. If theirvalues are always the same, the variables are likely to belong to this class. In the runtime system, the value of those variables may be checked dynamically, and the parallel
process may be rolled back when the value is unexpected.
Figure 1 (b) shows the second class of removable dependences, addressing dependences. In this class, the source code has no loading operations but the binary code
has because of addressing. In the example code, there is a write of a byte. The code iscompiled into the following assembly code on a Digital Alpha machine, which does nothave a byte write operation.
lda
s4, -28416(gp) /∗ load array base address ∗/addq s4, s0, s4/∗ shift to the target array element ∗//∗ load a quadword from the current element ∗/ldq u v0, 0(s4)mskbl v0, s4, v0/∗ set the target byte to 0 by masking ∗/stq u v0, 0(s4)/∗ store the new quadword to the array ∗/Our dependence detection finds a flow dependence between instruction “stq u v0,0(s4)” and “ldq u v0,0(s4)” when more than one phase instances execute that statement.
It is removable dependence since the loading operation is purely for the store operationand the value of the loaded location has no effects on the program’s execution.
Finally, flow dependences may happen when memory is reused across phase instances by a dynamic memory allocator. Figure 1 (c) shows an example. The two objects∗t and deletable are independent and have exclusive live periods. They are allocated tothe same memory region by the memory allocator. Process-based parallelization can ignore all these three classes of flow dependences because it uses separate address spaces
for processes.
Figure 1 (d) shows a real phase-dependence. An earlier phase instance fills arraywith some calculation results, which are loaded in a later phase instance. For correctness, the parallelization must protect such objects to avoid the violation of the dependence.
We develop an automatic tool to trace memory accesses in profiling runs, detect
different kinds of dependences, and then find the corresponding source code. The toolcannot detect all possible dependences in a program but it can help the parallelization
process by finding the likely parallel regions in the program. The tool first instruments
the binary code of a program to monitor memory accesses for dependence detection
through instrumentor ATOM [8] and then finds and displays the source code related tophase-level flow dependences that are not removable. Trace-level dependence tracking
has been used extensively for studying the limit of parallelism (an early example is giveby Kumar [3]) and for easing the job of debugging.
The effect of profiling depends on the coverage, that is, the portion of phase-level
dependences that we find through profiling. Multiple training runs help to improve thecoverage. Utility programs take a series of requests as an input; thus one execution
contains the process of many different requests. This leads to good coverage even witha single input.

2.3

Program Transformation

Our parallelization is process based. Thread-based parallelization is an alternative. Processes have their own address space and are thus more independent than threads. Utility
programs often have just a small number of phase-level flow dependences, since phaseinstances coincide with the memory usage period of a program. For example, variable
optind is the only flow dependence that is not removable in benchmark Gzip and requires code movement. There are other global data structures shared by phase instances,
but they can be privatized since they introduce no flow dependences. In thread-based
parallelization, multiple threads share the address space and must deal with antidependences and output dependences explicitly. In our study, we use process-based parallelization.
Many utility programs have a common high level structure; they first read requests
and then process them one by one. We design a unified framework for their parallelization, which is shown in our technical report [6] for lack of space.
There are two strategies for parallelization. One is to let programmers know thephase structure and the detected dependences so the programmer may parallelize theprogram when possible. The manual effort is simplified by the automatic tools, whichsuggest parallel regions that have good efficiency and scalability. The other strategy is
run-time dependence detection and phase-level speculation. All objects are put into a
protected region so speculation can be canceled when it fails. To improve efficiency andscalability, we can give special treatment to the dependences detected in the profilingruns. The operating system can monitor the accesses to those objects and roll back later
processes only when the dependences on those objects are violated or an earlier process
writes to the other objects in the protected region. This strategy requires less manual
work but requires the support of operating system. It has extra overhead. We use thefirst strategy in this work and are in the process of developing the second strategy.

3 Evaluation
We apply phase-level parallelization on Parser and Gzip in Spec CPU2000 suite. We
first discuss the issues in the parallelization of each benchmark, then report the performance of the parallelized programs.
3.1

ParserParser is a natural language (English) parsing program. It takes a series of sentences as
its input and parses them one by one. The detected phase boundary is before the parsing
of a sentence. The dependence detector reports 208 dependences in which 6 are distinct
flow dependences. Figure 2 shows part of the report. Among the six, the first two areremovable addressing dependences. The next two are implicit initialization removable
dependences: the store statement for lookup list traverses the list to free the list elements
and mn free list is freed at the end of each phase instance. The rest two dependences
are not easily removable. They include four global variables as array user variable,
unknown word defined, use unknown word and echo on. The last three variables areelements of array user variable. They are a set of global boolean variables, used to configure the parsing environment. For example, variable echo on determines whether to
output the original sentence or not. As the program comes across a command sentence
like “!echo” in the input file, it turns on the boolean value of echo on. The command
sentences are part of the input file. In our parallelization, we let the root process handle those command sentences first and then create child processes to parse every othersentence with the corresponding environment configuration.
Dep. typeaddressing

Operation FileLine Source code
store
analyze-linkage.c 659 patch array[i].used = FALSE;
load
analyze-linkage.c 659 patch array[i].used = FALSE;
addressing store
and.c
540 if (*s == ’*’) *u = *t;
load
and.c
540 if (*s == ’*’) *u = *t;initialization store
read-dict.c
763 lookup list = n;load
read-dict.c
760 while(lookup list != NULL) {initialization load
fast-match.c
59 mn free list = m;
store
fast-match.c
44 if (mn free list != NULL) {real dep.
store
main.c620 (∗(user variable[i].p)) =!!(∗(user variable[i].p));load
main.c1557 if (!(unknown word defined&& use unknown word)) {real dep.
store
main.c674 ∗(user variable[j].p) = !(∗(user variable[j].p));load
main.c1573 if (echo on) printf(“%c ”, mc);
Fig. 2. The partial report of dependences in Parser. Each pair of rows show the two lines of codecausing a phase-level flow dependence.

3.2

Gzip

Gzip is a popular data compression program (the Gzip used in the experiment is configured as the GNU compression program instead of the SPEC CPU2000 default version).
It takes a series of files as the input and compresses them one by one. It has only one
phase-level flow dependence, variable optind, which counts the number of input files.
It increases by one in each phase instance. Automatically our analysis tool finds theboundary of file processing as the phase boundary. The dependence detection finds theflow dependence. After applying the unified framework for transformation, the only remaining work is to move the counter increment operation from child processes to theroot process to resolve the dependence.
3.3

Methodology

We measure the performance on two multi-processor machines, whose configurations
are shown in Table 1.
We use “gcc -O3” for compilation. The Gzip has only one input file as its test
input. We duplicate the file multiple times as the regular input for profiling. The refinput of Gzip contains too few files to measure the effectiveness. We create 105 files by
duplicating all ref inputs 20 times each. The regular input for Parser is a file containing
six identical English sentences. We use the test input for the dependence profiling of
Parser and the ref input for evaluation.

Table 1. Machine configurations
CPU Number 4
16
CPU TypeIntel Xeon Sunfire Sparc V9
CPU Speed 2.0GHz 1.2GHz
L1 cache
512K
64K

3.4

Speedup

Figure 3 (a) and (b) show the speedup curves of the parallelized programs on Intel Xeon
and Sunfire multi-processor machines. The x-axis is logarithmic. We experiment up to 8
processes on the 4-CPU Intel machine. When the number of process is smaller than thenumber of processors, the speedup increases significantly and reaches the peak when
the process number is equal to the processor number. Gzip achieves 1.6 times speedup
and Parser achieves 2.0.
On the 16-CPU Sunfire machine, Parser shows 12.6 times speedup with 16 processes. Gzip shows 2.4 times speedup. The limited speedup of Gzip is due to the saturation of file I/O.

2.5

Gzip

14

ParserGzip

Parser12

2

SpeedupSpeedup

10

1.5

1

8
6
4

0.5
2

0

0

1

2

Processes

48(a) Speedup on an Intel Xeon machine

1

2

4

Processes

8

16

32

(b) Speedup on a Sunfire Sparc V9 machine

Fig. 3. Speedup of parallelized programs on multiple-processor machines

4 Related Work
There have been many efforts on automatic parallelization. The most related work is thestudy from software aspects. Those efforts roughly include two classes: task and data
based parallelization.
Previous parallelization techniques are based on static compiler or run-time techniques. The former tries to find the parallelism opportunities in program loops throughstatic dependence analysis in compilers and then applies privatization and reduction
parallelization [1, 9].) Static techniques work well for programs with regular, staticallyanalyzable access patterns. Run-time parallelization can reveal and exploit input dependent and dynamic parallelism in loop nests [5, 10]. In comparison, this work uses

profiling to parallelize programs at phase boundaries and exploit parallelism that may
span many loops and subroutines.
Another class of parallelization is based on Thread-level Speculation (TLS) hardware. TLS hardware provides support for speculative threads and dynamical roll backgiven the violation of dependences. This work partially relies on programmer knowledge but requires no special hardware support.

5 Conclusions
In this work, we propose a phase-level parallelization technique for parallelizing utility
programs. It finds phase boundaries by active profiling, identifies common phase-level
dependences by training, handles anti- and output dependences through process-based
parallelization, classifies removable flow dependences, and relies on programmer support to handle remaining flow dependences and ensure the correctness of the transformation. Unlike previous work, this technique helps to parallelize a program in coarse
granularity, which may span many loops and subroutines. Our preliminary experiments
show significant speedups for two non-trivial utility programs on multi-processor machines.

References
1. R. Allen and K. Kennedy. Optimizing Compilers for Modern Architectures: A Dependencebased Approach. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, October 2001.
2. M. J. Garzaran, M. Prvulovic, J. M. Llaberia, V. Vinals, L. Rauchwerger, and J. Torrellas.
Tradeoffs in buffering memory state for thread-level speculation in multiprocessors. In Proceedings of International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture, 2003.
3. M. Kumar. Measuring parallelism in computation-intensive scientific/engineering applications. IEEE Transactions on Computers, 37, 1988.
4. D. Ortega, Ivan Martel, Eduard Ayguade, Mateo Valero, and Venkata Krishnan. Quantifying
the benefits of specint distant parallelism in simultaneous multi-threading architectures. In
Proceeding of the Eighth International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques, Newport Beach, California, October 1999.
5. L. Rauchwerger and D. Padua. The LRPD test: Speculative run-time parallelization of loops
with privatization and reduction parallelization. In Proceedings of ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, La Jolla, CA, June 1995.
6. X. Shen and C. Ding. Parallelization of utility programs based on behavior phase analysis. Technical Report TR 876, Department of Computer Science, University of Rochester,
September 2005.
7. X. Shen, C. Ding, S. Dwarkadas, and M. L. Scott. Characterizing phases in service-oriented
applications. Technical Report TR 848, Department of Computer Science, University ofRochester, November 2004.
8. A. Srivastava and A. Eustace. ATOM: A system for building customized program analysis
tools. In Proceedings of ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and
Implementation, Orlando, Florida, June 1994.
9. M. Wolfe. Optimizing Compilers for Supercomputers. The MIT Press, 1989.
10. C. Q. Zhu and P. C. Yew. A scheme to enforce data dependence on large multiprocessor
systems. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 13(6), 1987.