Programming Shared Memory Multiprocessors with Deterministic Message-Passing Concurrency: Compiling SHIM to Pthreads

Multicore shared-memory architectures are becoming prevalent and bring many programming challenges. Among the biggest are data races: accesses to shared resources that make a program´s behavior depend on scheduling decisions beyond its control. To eliminate such races, the SHIM concurrent programming language adopts deterministic message passing as it sole communication mechanism. We demonstrate such language restrictions are practical by presenting a SHIM to C-plus-Pthreads compiler that can produce efficient code for shared-memory multiprocessors. We present a parallel JPEG decoder and FFT exhibiting 3.05 and 3.3times speedups on a four-core processor.