Typhon: A Developer's Tool for Refactoring Legacy Software for Multi-threaded Operation

Several mission-critical Navy applications are written as single-threaded Component Object Model) COM applications. They do not receive any benefits from the recent trend in computer architecture that emphasizes concurrent execution of multiple threads. ATC-NY will build Typhon, a plugin for Visual Studio that will aid developers in transforming such applications to take advantage of multiple threads. Typhon analyzes the source of legacy applications to automatically identify multi-threaded optimization opportunities. When it can prove multi-threaded optimizations are safe, Typhon automatically transforms code to take advantage of them. When it cannot, it annotates the source to identify the type of optimization and how it could be made safe. By leveraging knowledge of how COM works, Typhon is able to identify more optimizations than existing parallelizing compilers. In addition, Typhons integration with Visual Studio enables it to suggest refactoring strategies that would create additional optimization opportunities. Typhon supports Visual Basic 6 and other Visual Studio languages like C and C++.