Title: Trebuchet: exploring TLP with dataflow virtualisation

Authors: Tiago A.O. Alves, Leandro A.J. Marzulo, Felipe M.G. Franca, Vitor Santos Costa

Addresses: Programa de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computacao, COPPE, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Cidade Universitaria, Centro de Tecnologia, Bloco H, Sala 319, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, 21941-972, Brazil. ' Programa de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computacao, COPPE, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Cidade Universitaria, Centro de Tecnologia, Bloco H, Sala 319, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, 21941-972, Brazil. ' Programa de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computacao, COPPE, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Cidade Universitaria, Centro de Tecnologia, Bloco H, Sala 319, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, 21941-972, Brazil. ' CRACS and INESC-Porto LA, Faculdade de Ciencias, Universidade do Porto, Rua do Campo Alegre, 1021, 4169-007 Porto, Portugal

Abstract: Parallel programming has become mandatory to fully exploit the potential of multi-core CPUs. The dataflow model provides a natural way to exploit parallelism. However, specifying dependences and control using fine-grained instructions in dataflow programs can be complex and present unwanted overheads. To address this issue, we have designed TALM: a coarse-grained dataflow execution model to be used on top of widespread architectures. We implemented TALM as the Trebuchet virtual machine for multi-cores. The programmer identifies code blocks that can run in parallel and connects them to form a dataflow graph, which allows one to have the benefits of parallel dataflow execution in a Von Neumann machine, with small programming effort. We parallelised a set of seven applications using our approach and compared with OpenMP implementations. Results show that Trebuchet can be competitive with state-of-the-art technology, while providing the benefits of dataflow execution.

Keywords: dataflow architectures; parallel programming; computer architecture; dataflow virtualisation; Trebuchet virtual machine; multicore; dataflow graphs; TLP.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHPSA.2011.040466

International Journal of High Performance Systems Architecture, 2011 Vol.3 No.2/3, pp.137 - 148

Published online: 21 Mar 2015 *

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