Programming multi-core architectures using data-flow techniques

Abstract

In this paper we present a Multithreaded programming methodology for multi-core systems that utilizes Data-Flow concurrency. The programmer augments the program with macros that define threads and their data dependencies. The macros are expanded into calls to the run-time that creates and maintains the dependency graph of the threads and performs the scheduling of the threads using Data-Flow principles. We demonstrate the programming methodology and discuss some of the issues and optimizations affecting the performance. A detailed evaluation is presented using two applications as case studies. The evaluation shows that the two applications scale well and compare favorably with the results of similar systems. Our results demonstrate that Data-Flow concurrency can be efficiently implemented as a Virtual Machine on multi-core systems. ©2010 IEEE.