An empirical study of automatic restructuring of nonnumerical programs for parallel processors

The feasibility of automatic restructuring of nonnumerical programs for parallel processing is studied through experiments using Parafrase, an automatic restructurer at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Parallel processing speedup results due to automatic restructuring for several basic nonnumerical problems are presented. The loops encountered are classified at a low level. On the basis of the speedup results and the analyses of the loop types, the difficulty and the effectiveness of automatic restructuring are discussed. The experiments suggest that automatic restructuring can be a useful tool for exploiting parallelism in the sequential form of nonnumerical programs.