Chapter 4a: Brandon Chisholm, Chris Barile

Automatic Parallelism is the process of automatically converting sequential code into code that will make use of multiple processors. One main reason for implementing automatic parallelism is to save time and energy compared to converting the code manually.<ref name="wiki" /> There are several techniques that have been created for parallelizing code, but each has limitations.

Limitations

One of the major limitations of automatic parallelization is that a computer lacks the insight into the overall intention of a program that a human would have. The programmer understands what the program must do, and can use that to determine if there are alternate approaches or algorithms for parallelizing the code. Even when parallelizing manually, a programmer may not have enough insight into parallel programming, and will need the assistance of an expert to improve code performance.<ref name="ncsa" />

References

<references> <ref name="chia">http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/%7Echiayuan/cs262a/cs262a_parallel.pdf</ref> <ref name="dipa">http://www.csc.villanova.edu/%7Etway/publications/DiPasquale_Masplas05_Paper5.pdf</ref> <ref name="wiki">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_parallelization</ref> <ref name="ncsa">http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/extremeideas/site/on_the_limits_of_automatic_parallelization</ref> </references>