RETK: A reverse engineering toolkit for extracting parallelism from sequential code

Migration of code from an imperative paradigm to the parallel/distributed paradigm, is often done in an ad hoc manner. In this paper we describe a reverse engineering toolkit designed to systematically approach the code migration. The main components of the toolkit include (1) an information extractor to extract the design of the original system, (2) a dependence analyzer to analyze the data and control dependences in the design, and (3) an intelligent design assistant to map the sequential design to parallel environments. Information provided by the toolkit has potential for increasing the understanding of the system. The primary objective is to facilitate the reengineering of sequential code to parallel architectures in a systematic, partially automated manner.