An empirical characterization of stream programs and its implications for language and compiler design

Stream programs represent an important class of high-performance computations. Defined by their regular processing of sequences of data, stream programs appear most commonly in the context of audio, video, and digital signal processing, though also in networking, encryption, and other areas. In orde...

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Published in:PACT '10 : proceedings of the Nineteenth International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques : September 11-15, 2010, Vienna, Austria pp. 365 - 376
Main Authors: Thies, William, Amarasinghe, Saman
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: ACM 11.09.2010
Subjects:
Benchmark testing
Computer architecture
Computer languages
Design
Experimentation
Finite impulse response filters
Languages
Pipelines
Streaming media
Transform coding
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Abstract Stream programs represent an important class of high-performance computations. Defined by their regular processing of sequences of data, stream programs appear most commonly in the context of audio, video, and digital signal processing, though also in networking, encryption, and other areas. In order to develop effective compilation techniques for the streaming domain, it is important to understand the common characteristics of these programs. Prior characterizations of stream programs have examined legacy implementations in C, C++, or FORTRAN, making it difficult to extract the high-level properties of the algorithms. In this work, we characterize a large set of stream programs that was implemented directly in a stream programming language, allowing new insights into the high-level structure and behavior of the applications. We utilize the StreamIt benchmark suite, consisting of 65 programs and 33,600 lines of code. We characterize the bottlenecks to parallelism, the data reference patterns, the input/output rates, and other properties. The lessons learned have implications for the design of future architectures, languages and compilers for the streaming domain.
AbstractList Stream programs represent an important class of high-performance computations. Defined by their regular processing of sequences of data, stream programs appear most commonly in the context of audio, video, and digital signal processing, though also in networking, encryption, and other areas. In order to develop effective compilation techniques for the streaming domain, it is important to understand the common characteristics of these programs. Prior characterizations of stream programs have examined legacy implementations in C, C++, or FORTRAN, making it difficult to extract the high-level properties of the algorithms. In this work, we characterize a large set of stream programs that was implemented directly in a stream programming language, allowing new insights into the high-level structure and behavior of the applications. We utilize the StreamIt benchmark suite, consisting of 65 programs and 33,600 lines of code. We characterize the bottlenecks to parallelism, the data reference patterns, the input/output rates, and other properties. The lessons learned have implications for the design of future architectures, languages and compilers for the streaming domain.
Author Amarasinghe, Saman
Thies, William
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  fullname: Amarasinghe, Saman
  email: saman@mit.edu
  organization: Massachusetts Inst. of Technol., Cambridge, MA, USA
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SubjectTerms Benchmark testing
Computer architecture
Computer languages
Design
Experimentation
Finite impulse response filters
Languages
Pipelines
Streaming media
Transform coding
Title An empirical characterization of stream programs and its implications for language and compiler design
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