COMPILING C FOR THE EARTH MULTITHREADED ARCHITECTURE

Multithreaded architectures provide an opportunity for efficiently exe cuting programs with irregular parallelism and/or irregular locality. This paper presents a strategy that makes use of the multithreaded exe cution model without exposing multithreading to the programmer. Our ap proach is to design simple extensions to C, and to provide compiler su pport that automatically translates high-level C programs into lower-l evel threaded programs. In this paper we present EARTH-C our extended C language which contains simple constructs for specifying control par allelism, data locality, shared variables and atomic operations. Based on EARTH-C, we describe compiler techniques that are used for transla ting to lower-level Threaded-C programs for the EARTH multithreaded ar chitecture. We demonstrate our approach with six benchmark programs. W e show that even naive EARTH-C programs can lead to reasonable perform ance, and that more advanced EARTH-C programs can give performance ver y close to hand-coded threated-C programs.