As multicore computing becomes the norm, exploiting parallelism in applications becomes a requirement for all software. Many applications exhibit different kinds of parallelism, but most parallel programming languages are biased towards a specific paradigm, of which two common ones are task and streaming parallelism. This results in a dilemma for programmers who would prefer to use the same language to exploit different paradigms for different applications. Our thesis is an integration of stream-parallel and task-parallel paradigms can be achieved in a single language with high programmability and high resource efficiency, when a general dataflow programming model is used as the foundation. The dataflow model used in this thesis is Intel's Concurrent Collections (CnC). While CnC is general enough to express both task-parallel and stream-parallel paradigms, all current implementations of CnC use task-based runtime systems that do not deliver the resource efficiency expected from stream-parallel programs. For streaming programs, this use of a task-based runtime system is wasteful of computing cycles and makes memory management more difficult than it needs to be. We propose Streaming Concurrent Collections (SCnC), a streaming system that can execute a subset of applications supported by Concurrent Collections, a general macro data-flow coordination language. Integration of streaming and task models allows application developers to benefit from the efficiency of stream parallelism as well as the generality of task parallelism, all in the context of an easy-to-use and general dataflow programming model. To achieve this integration, we formally define streaming access patterns that, if respected, allow CnC task based applications to be executed using the streaming model. We specify conditions under which an application can run safely, meaning with identical result and without deadlocks using the streaming runtime. A static analysis that verifies if an application respects these patterns is proposed and we describe algorithmic transformations to bring a larger set of CnC applications to a form that can be run using the streaming runtime. To take advantage of dynamic parallelism opportunities inside streaming applications, we propose a simple tuning annotation for streaming applications, that have traditionally been considered with fixed parallelism. Our dynamic parallelism construct, the dynamic splitter, which allows fission of stateful filters with little guidance from the programmer is based on the idea of different places where computations are distributed. Finally, performance results show that transitioning from the task parallel runtime to streaming runtime leads to a throughput increase of up to 40×. In summary, this thesis shows that stream-parallel and task-parallel paradigms can be integrated in a single language when a dataflow model is used as the foundation, and that this integration can be achieved with high programmability and high resource efficiency. Integration of these models allows application developers to benefit from the efficiency of stream parallelism as well as the generality of task parallelism, all in the context of an easy-to-use dataflow programming model.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:RICE/oai:scholarship.rice.edu:1911/70433 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Contributors | Sarkar, Vivek |
| Source Sets | Rice University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis, Text |
| Format | 105 p., application/pdf |
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