Design and Development of a Parallel Lexical Analyzer for C Language

Future of computing is rapidly moving towards massively multi-core architecture because of its power and cost advantages. Almost everywhere Multi-core processors are being used now-a-days and number of cores per chip is also relatively increasing. To exploit full potential offered by multi-core architecture, the system software like compilers should be designed for parallelized execution. In the past, various significant works have been made to change the design of traditional compiler to take advantages of the future multi-core platform. This paper focuses on adapting parallelism in the lexical analysis phase of the compilation process. The main objective of our proposal is to do the lexical analysis i.e., finding the tokens in an input stream in parallel. We use the parallel constructs available in OpenMP to achieve parallelism in the lexical analysis process for multi-core machines. The experimental result of our proposal shows a significant performance improvement in the parallel lexical analysis phase as compared to sequential version in terms of time of execution.