Cilkpride : always-on visualizations for parallel programming

Abstract

Parallel programming is an increasingly important way for programmers to squeeze more performance out of their programs. Parallelization is error-prone, however, and programmers often forget to run error checkers and performance analyzers regularly. This thesis presents Cilkpride, an IDE plug-in that uses always-on visualizations to show programmers information on on their parallel program directly inside their IDE. Cilkpride runs a race checker and program profiler every time code is changed and immediately displays output to make programmers always aware of parallelization errors and performance bottlenecks. Programmers can then react and fix these issues quickly. To evaluate the system, we asked students who had taken MIT's 6.172 class, a performance engineering course, to use Cilkpride. Students found Cilkpride useful, helping them find races and bottlenecks.