Increasing the delivered performance of computers by running programs in parallel is an old idea with a new urgency. Multi cores (multi processors) on chips have emerged as a way to increase performance wherever chips are used. The talk will focus on the role programming languages and compilers must play in delivering parallel performance to users and applications. The speakerpsilas personal experiences with languages and compilers for high performance systems will provide the basis for her observations. The talk is intended to encourage the exploration of new approaches.

Increasing the delivered performance of computers by running programs in parallel is an old idea with a new urgency. Multi cores (multi processors) on chips have emerged as a way to increase performance wherever chips are used. The talk will focus on the role programming languages and compilers must play in delivering parallel performance to users and applications. The speaker's personal experiences with languages and compilers for high performance systems will provide the basis for her observations. The talk is intended to encourage the exploration of new approaches.

An approach to finding and forming parallel processes for both sequential and parallel programs is presented. The approach is presented in a framework that can create useful parallelism for a variety of parallel architectures. The framework makes use of a control dependence graph to capture maximal parallelism, a process tree to expose useful parallelism, renaming and storage segregation to reduce data dependencies, and an architecture-specific cost analyzer to evaluate the effectiveness of the potential processes. The framework is currently being implemented.