This paper presents ParaMeter, an interactive program analysis and visualization system for large traces. Using ParaMeter, a software developer can locate and analyze regions of code that may yield to parallelization efforts and to possibly extract performance from multicore hardware. The key contributions in the paper are (1) a method to use interactive visualization of traces to find and exploit parallelism, (2) interactive-speed visualization of large-scale trace dependencies, (3) interactive-speed visualization of code interactions, and (4) a BDD variable ordering for DD-compressed traces that results in fast visualization, fast analysis, and good compression. ParaMeter's effectiveness is demonstrated by finding and exploiting parallelism in 175.vpr. Measurements of ParaMeter's visualization algorithms show that they are up to seventy-five thousand times faster than prior approaches.

Low overhead core-to-core communication is critical for efficient pipeline-parallel software applications. This paper presents FastForward, a cache-optimized single-producer/single-consumer concurrent lock-free queue for pipeline parallelism on multicore architectures, with weak to strongly ordered consistency models. Enqueue and dequeue times on a 2.66 GHz Opteron 2218 based system are as low as 28.5 ns, up to 5x faster than the next best solution. FastForward's effectiveness is demonstrated for real applications by applying it to line-rate soft network processing on Gigabit Ethernet with general purpose commodity hardware.

Network processors provide an economical programmable platform to handle the high throughput and frame rates of modern and next-generation communication systems. However, these platforms have exchanged general-purpose capabilities for performance.