SPLENDID: Supporting Parallel LLVM-IR Enhanced Natural Decompilation for Interactive Development [abstract] (PDF)
Zujun Tan, Yebin Chon, Michael Kruse, Johannes Doerfert, Ziyang Xu, Brian Homerding, Simone Campanoni, and David I. August
Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), March 2023.
Accept Rate: 26% (72/270).
Awarded all top ACM Reproducibility Badges offered by the Artifact Evaluation Committee.

Manually writing parallel programs is difficult and error-prone. Automatic parallelization could address this issue, but limitations, including not having facts only known to the programmer, can limit its profitability. A parallelizing compiler that collaborates with the programmer could increase the coverage and performance of parallelization while reducing the errors and overhead associated with manual parallelization. Unlike collaboration involving analysis tools that report program properties or make parallelization suggestions to the programmer, decompiler-based collaboration could leverage the strength of existing parallelizing compilers to provide programmers with a natural compiler-parallelized starting point for further parallelization or refinement. Despite this potential, existing decompilers fail to do this because they do not generate portable parallel source code compatible with any compiler of the source language. This paper presents SPLENDID, an LLVM-IR to C/OpenMP decompiler that enables collaborative parallelization by producing standard parallel OpenMP. Using published manual parallelizations of the PolyBench benchmark suite as a reference, SPLENDID's collaborative approach produces programs that are twice as fast as either Polly-based automatic parallelization or manual parallelization alone. SPLENDID's portable parallel code is also more natural than that from existing decompilers, obtaining a 39x higher average BLEU score.