Implicit data-parallelism in Kahn Process Networks: Bridging the MacQueen gap

Research output: Contribution to book/Conference proceedings/Anthology/ReportConference contributionContributedpeer-review

Abstract

Modern embedded systems are rapidly increasing their complexity, both in terms of numbers of cores, as well as heterogeneity. To generate efficient code for these systems, it is common to leverage formal models of computation. Among these, the dataflow model of Kahn Process Networks (KPN) is widespread because it is expressive but guarantees a deterministic execution. However, the KPN model is ill-suited to expose data-level parallelism, since this has to be made explicit in the process network. This is aggravated by the fact that its most common execution model, Kahn-MacQueen, poses restrictive conditions on the scheduling of data-parallel processes, leading to an inefficient execution. In this paper we present a novel extension to the KPN model and a relaxed execution strategy that addresses this problem, while keeping the deterministic KPN semantics. It improves run-time adaptivity in malleable way and provides implicit parallelism. We evaluate our approach on two architectures, improving the performance of a benchmark by up to 25.6 % on an Intel chip with hyper-threading, and by up to 78.0 % on a heterogeneous embedded ARM big.LITTLE architecture.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationPARMA-DITAM 2018 - Proceedings
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM), New York
Pages20-25
Number of pages6
ISBN (electronic)9781450364447
Publication statusPublished - 23 Jan 2018
Peer-reviewedYes

Workshop

Title9th Workshop on Parallel Programming and Run-Time Management Techniques for Many-Core Architectures and 7th Workshop on Design Tools and Architectures for Multicore Embedded Computing Platforms
Abbreviated titlePARMA-DITAM 2018
Duration23 January 2018
CityManchester
CountryUnited Kingdom

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0002-5007-445X/work/141545550

Keywords

Research priority areas of TU Dresden

Keywords

  • Adaptivity, Heterogeneous, MPSoC, Process networks, Streaming applications