A similarity-based analysis tool for porting OpenMP applications

Exascale computers are expected to exhibit an unprecedented level of complexity, thereby posing significant challenges for porting applications to these new systems. One of the ways to support this transition is to create tools that allow their users to benefit from prior successful porting experiences. The key to such an approach is the manner in which we define source code similarity, and whether similar codes can be ported in the same way to a given system. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on the notion of similarity that uses static and dynamic code features to check if two serial subroutines can be ported with the same OpenMP strategy. Our approach creates an annotated family distance tree based on the syntactic structure of subroutines, where subroutines that belong to the same syntactic family and share the similar code features have a greater potential to be optimized in the same way. We describe the design and implementation of a tool, based upon a compiler and performance tool, that is used to gather the data to build this porting planning tree. We then validate our approach by analyzing the similarity in subroutines of the serial version of the NAS benchmarks and comparing how they were ported in the OpenMP version of the suite.