[LLVMdev] [RFC] Progress towards OpenMP support

[Hal Finkel]

On Thu, 13 Sep 2012 09:01:18 +0530
Sanjoy Das <sanjoy at playingwithpointers.com> wrote:

> Hi Hal,
> 
> > My rationale for proposing the self-consistent metadata solution was
> > that it seemed to be the safest option. If we simply insist that all
> > relevant passes use the ParallizationMetadata pass, without any
> > verification, then we could end up with parallelization-unaware
> > passes silently miscompiling code when parallelization is enabled.
> > Do you have a way of avoiding that?
> 
> I'm still not very clear about this.  Either a pass understands (and
> looks at) the parallelization metadata or it doesn't.  In case it
> doesn't it doesn't matter what the metadata looks like anyway.  In
> case it does, we have the ParallelizationMetadata pass to present a
> consistent view of the metadata; how does it matter how the metadata
> actually looks like?  I think it will be helpful if you could
> illustrate your point with an example.

My largest concern is, for example, having a parallel region with a
serial subregion, and having some transformation pass do something
which drops the metadata marking the serial subregion while leaving the
parent parallel region. This would lead to miscompiled code. As
transformation passes are allowed to drop metadata arbitrarily,
and people have out-of-tree passes that do IPO (which we can't fix
ourselves), I think that we need to assume that any combination of the
metadata can be dropped at any time.

An alternative approach, which you seem to be proposing, is that the
parallelization reads the metadata up front (and then drops it all). If
a pass does not preserve that analysis, then it will be invalidated, and
the parallelization will be lost. This, indeed, might be a better
approach, but would at least require touching a lot more code (if
nothing else, we'd need to audit and then add the analysis preservation
calls to a lot of otherwise-unrelated code).

 -Hal

> 
> To be clear, I'm not saying that dropping metadata is unreasonable;
> but am trying to figure out what the core issues are. :)
> 
> > I'm not sure. We do need to make sure, for example, that an
> > 'ordered' region stays properly nested within its parent loop.
> 
> The ordered region mentions the parent loop anyway.  Since the
> grandparent region refs the ordered region, we can ensure that the
> ordered region isn't dropped (leading to races).
> 
> > We should assert when an individual metadata entry is malformed; we
> > should drop non-self-consistent sets of metadata entries (as these
> > might have resulted from the actions of non-parallelization-aware
> > transformation passes.
> 
> Makes sense.
> 
> Thanks!



-- 
Hal Finkel
Postdoctoral Appointee
Leadership Computing Facility
Argonne National Laboratory