Contech: Efficiently Generating Dynamic Task Graphs for Arbitrary Parallel Programs

Parallel programs can be characterized by task graphs encoding instructions, memory accesses, and the parallel work’s dependencies, while representing any threading library and architecture. This article presents Contech, a high performance framework for generating dynamic task graphs from arbitrary parallel programs, and a novel representation enabling programmers and compiler optimizations to understand and exploit program aspects. The Contech framework supports a variety of languages (including C, C++, and Fortran), parallelization libraries, and ISAs (including × 86 and ARM). Running natively for collection speed and minimizing program perturbation, the instrumentation shows 4 × improvement over a Pin-based implementation on PARSEC and NAS benchmarks.