Is There Hope for Automatic Parallelization of Legacy Industry Automation Applications?

Abstract

Multicore processors have become common in desktop workstations. The trend towards multicores extends to consumer embedded systems like smartphones. In the future, systems for industry automation will also use multiprocessors. In order to migrate legacy industry automation codes to the new hardware platforms, they must be parallelized. As manual parallelization is known to be error-prone, an automatic parallelization is desirable. We investigate how well legacy applications are suited to an automatic parallelization at the function level. We use compiler analyses to determine the amount of parallelism in the program and calculate the potential speedup. We analyze a total of 44 factory control programs to understand how well real codes can be parallelized and show that 13 codes can be parallelized with a reasonable speedup.