Computer Laboratory

Computer Architecture Group

HELIX - Automatic Parallelisation

With the advent of multi and many-core processors, there is a growing need for tools that can extract parallelism from general sequential codes. Automatic parallelisation is a seductive route to achieving this, since it removes the burden of identifying and exploiting parallelism from the programmer. However, automatically parallelising ordinary, irregular, single-threaded codes and obtaining significant speedups has historically been an extremely difficult challenge.

The goal of the HELIX project is to investigate hardware and software schemes for parallelism. HELIX is a fully automatic loop parallelisation technique, implemented in a prototype compiler which is under active development.

The HELIX project is a collaboration between researchers in Cambridge and colleagues at Harvard University. On the Cambridge side, the team consists of:

More information can be found on the main HELIX project website.