Special Issue: Current Trends in Compilers for Parallel Computers

This special issue of Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience contains a selection of the papers presented at the 12th International Workshop on Compilers for Parallel Computers (CPC’2006), held in A Coruña, Spain, 9–11 January 2006. The CPC Workshop series is well established as an invitational workshop for leading research groups in the field (mainly from Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific) to provide a forum for exchanging and developing new ideas in compiler design for parallel systems and related topics. The Workshop series began in 1989 in Oxford, U.K., and continued every 18 months in a European city: Paris, France, 1990; Vienna, Austria, 1992; Delft, The Netherlands, 1993; Málaga, Spain, 1995; Aachen, Germany, 1996; Linköping, Sweden, 1998; Aussois, France, 2000; Edinburgh, U.K., 2001; Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2003; Chiemsee, Germany, 2004; and A Coruña, Spain, 2006. The next edition will be held in 2007 in Sintra (Lisbon), Portugal. The 32 papers presented at the 12th Workshop on Compilers for Parallel Computers covered a wide scope of compiler topics with a special focus on parallelization and optimization, ranging from instruction-level parallelism to large-scale parallel systems. The variety of the research topics addressed was reflected in the 11 sessions in which the papers were distributed: Embedded Systems, Compiling for VLIW Processors, Exploiting Accelerating Hardware, Memory Hierarchy Optimizations, Analysis Algorithms, Domain-Specific Optimization, Compiling Java, Synchronization and Consistency, Thread-Level Parallelism, Parallel Processing, and Optimizations. This special issue comprises largely improved and carefully reviewed versions of seven selected papers from CPC’2006. Most of the submitted manuscripts were reviewed by three referees with expertise in the subject area of the manuscript, in a two-round review process of eight months in which 52 reviewers participated. As the CPC workshop was specially focused on parallelizing compilers, it is no surprise that a large fraction of the papers in this issue, three out of seven, fall into this category. Also, it is interesting to note that they all deal with the shared memory programming paradigm, and that two of them study the parallelization of applications written in an object-oriented language. The first characteristic is a sign of the times, with the appearance first of processors with simultaneous multithreading, and currently with the arrival to the market of chip multiprocessors with an increasing number of cores. No doubt these facts are increasingly pushing the interest of both industry and academia in the improvement of the compilers, runtime systems, and languages available to exploit parallelism in shared memory systems. As for object-oriented programming, it is regarded by many as essential to improve programmer