Application execution path analysis for the automatic parallelisation of binary codes in the Intel x86 platform

摘要

Traditionally, computer programs have been developed using the sequential programming paradigm. With the advent of parallel computing systems, such as multicore processors and distributed environments, the sequential paradigm became a barrier to the utilisation of the available resources, since the program is restricted to a single processing unit. To address this issue, we propose a transparent automatic parallelisation tool with a binary rewriter. The steps of our approach are: the disassembly of the Intel x86 application, its transformation into an intermediary language; the analysis of this intermediary representation to obtain the flow and dependency graphs; the partitioning of the application into parallel units, using the obtained graphs; and, finally, the reassembly of the application back into the original Intel x86 architecture. By transforming the compiled application software, we aim at obtaining a program which can better explore the parallel resources, with no extra effort required from users or developers.