Improved Parallel Lexical Analysis Using OpenMP on Multi-core Machines

Lexical Analysis is the first and foremost step of a compiler. Various attempts have been made to improve the lexical analysis phase by exploiting the inherent parallel processing capability of multi-core machines. In this paper we present an approach for doing parallel lexical analysis using OpenMP. We demonstrate the improvement in lexical analysis phase by automatically generating C programs having up to 10,000 potentially parallel constructs like if..else, for, while loops, switch..case etc. The maximum speedup achieved for 7 CPUs is 6.84.