Tareador: a tool to unveil parallelization strategies at undergraduate level

Abstract

This paper presents a methodology and framework designed to assist students in the process of finding appropriate task decomposition strategies for their sequential program, as well as identifying bottlenecks in the later execution of the parallel program. One of the main components of this framework is Tareador, which provides a simple API to specify potential task decomposition strategies for a sequential program. Once the student proposes how to break the sequential code into tasks, Tareador 1) provides information about the dependences between tasks that should be honored when implementing that task decomposition using a parallel programming model; and 2) estimates the potential parallelism that could be achieved in an ideal parallel architecture with infinite processors; and 3) sim- ulates the parallel execution on an ideal architecture estimating the potential speed–up that could be achieved on a number of processors. The pedagogical style of the methodology is currently applied to teach parallelism in a third-year compulsory subject in the Bachelor Degree in Informatics Engineering at the Barcelona School of Informatics of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) - BarcelonaTech.