Integrating Dataflow Abstractions into the Shared Memory Model

In this paper we present Atomic Dataflow model (ADF), a new task-based parallel programming model for C/C++ which integrates dataflow abstractions into the shared memory programming model. The ADF model provides pragma directives that allow a programmer to organize a program into a set of tasks and...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:2012 IEEE 24th International Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing pp. 243 - 251
Main Authors: Gajinov, Vladimir, Stipic, Srdjan, Unsal, Osman S., Harris, Tim, Ayguade, Eduard, Cristal, Adrian
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: IEEE 01.10.2012
Subjects:
Buffer storage
Data models
dataflow
Games
Instruction sets
Parallel programming
Programming
Runtime
shared memory
Synchronization
transactional memory
ISBN:1467347906, 9781467347907
ISSN:1550-6533
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:In this paper we present Atomic Dataflow model (ADF), a new task-based parallel programming model for C/C++ which integrates dataflow abstractions into the shared memory programming model. The ADF model provides pragma directives that allow a programmer to organize a program into a set of tasks and to explicitly define input data for each task. The task dependency information is conveyed to the ADF runtime system which constructs the dataflow task graph and builds the necessary infrastructure for dataflow execution. Additionally, the ADF model allows tasks to share data. The key idea is that computation is triggered by dataflow between tasks but that, within a task, execution occurs by making atomic updates to common mutable state. To that end, the ADF model employs transactional memory which guarantees atomicity of shared memory updates. We show examples that illustrate how the programmability of shared memory can be improved using the ADF model. Moreover, our evaluation shows that the ADF model performs well in comparison with programs parallelized using OpenMP and transactional memory.
ISBN:1467347906
9781467347907
ISSN:1550-6533
DOI:10.1109/SBAC-PAD.2012.24