Abstraction of information flow and functional dependency from a restructured legacy ‘C’ program for parallelization

The prologue of multicore architectures in the hardware computation industry has crafted significant challenge to the software industry working with single core sequential programs. Realizing the total potentiality of the multicore requires redefining software programming by initializing parallelization with decomposition of the software into functional modules amenable for multicore through parallel execution. The paper proposes a methodology which considers restructured legacy ‘C’ program as input and abstracts the complete design information (control and data) in the form of Information Flow Table (IFT). The IFT tabulates the ordered sequential flow of control and data along the program. The abstracted IFT is further used for analyzing the inter and intra control and data flow dependency amongst the computational units of the program, and realize the relations depicting the control and data dependency and capture the data influencing the behavior of the computational unit along its flow. These functional dependency relations further provide scope for the abstraction of functionality from the legacy program, inducing parallelization.