Orchestrating the execution of stream programs on multicore platforms

Abstract

While multicore hardware has become ubiquitous, explicitly parallel programming models and compiler techniques for exploiting parallelism on these systems have noticeably lagged behind. Stream programming is one model that has wide applicability in the multimedia, graphics, and signal processing domains. Streaming models execute as a set of independent actors that explicitly communicate data through channels. This paper presents a compiler technique for planning and orchestrating the execution of streaming applications on multicore platforms. An integrated unfolding and partitioning step based on integer linear programming is presented that unfolds data parallel actors as needed and maximally packs actors onto cores. Next, the actors are assigned to pipeline stages in such a way that all communication is maximally overlapped with computation on the cores. To facilitate experimentation, a generalized code generation template for mapping the software pipeline onto the Cell architecture is presented. For a range of streaming applications, a geometric mean speedup of 14.7x is achieved on a 16-core Cell platform compared to a single core.