Parkour: Parallel Speedup Estimates for Serial Programs

We present Parkour, a tool that creates parallel speedup estimates for unparallelized serial programs. Unlike previous approaches, it does not require any prior human analysis or modification of the program. Parkour automatically quantifies the parallelism of a given program and provides an approximate upper bound for performance, modeling fundamental parallelization constraints. For the evaluation, Parkour is applied to three benchmarks from the NAS Parallel benchmark suite running on a 32-core AMD multicore system, and three benchmarks running on the fine-grained MIT Raw processor. The results are compelling. Parkour is able to significantly improve the accuracy of parallel speedup estimates relative to the critical path analysis technique that it extends.