Title
An evaluation of code generation of dataflow languages on manycore architectures
Abstract
Today computer architectures are shifting from single core to manycores due to several reasons such as performance demands, power and heat limitations. However, shifting to manycores results in additional complexities, especially with regard to efficient development of applications. Hence there is a need to raise the abstraction level of development techniques for the manycores while exposing the inherent parallelism in the applications. One promising class of programming languages is dataflow languages and in this paper we evaluate and optimize the code generation for one such language, CAL. We have also developed a communication library to support the intercore communication. The code generation can target multiple architectures, but the results presented in this paper is focused on Adapteva's many core architecture Epiphany. We use the two-dimensional inverse discrete cosine transform (2D-IDCT) as our benchmark and compare our code generation from CAL with a hand-written implementation developed in C. Several optimizations in the code generation as well as in the communication library are described, and we have observed that the most critical optimization is reducing the number of external memory accesses. Combining all optimizations we have been able to reduce the difference in execution time between auto-generated and handwritten implementations from a factor of 4.3× down to a factor of only 1.3×.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1109/RTCSA.2014.6910501
RTCSA
Keywords
Field
DocType
programming languages,manycore architectures,data flow computing,code generation,manycore,dataflow languages,epiphany,heat limitations,multiprocessing systems,computer architectures,external memory accesses,2d inverse discrete cosine transform,computer architecture,intercore communication,evaluation,communication library,2d-idct,program compilers,actor machine,embedded systems
Single-core,Computer architecture,Computer science,Parallel computing,Code generation,Real-time computing,Dataflow,Multi-core processor
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.49
9
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Suleyman Savas151.93
Essayas Gebrewahid2223.40
Zain ul-Abdin3114.76
Tomas Nordström410515.82
Mingkun Yang5446.60