Domain-specific language & support tools for high-level stream parallelism

Abstract

Stream-based systems are representative of several application domains including video, audio, networking, graphic processing, etc. Stream programs may run on different kinds of parallel architectures (desktop, servers, cell phones, and supercomputers) and represent significant workloads on our current computing systems. Nevertheless, most of them are still not parallelized. Moreover, when new software has to be developed, programmers often face a trade-off between coding productivity, code portability, and performance. To solve this problem, we provide a new Domain-Specific Language (DSL) that naturally/on-the-fly captures and represents parallelism for stream-based applications. The aim is to offer a set of attributes (through annotations) that preserves the program’s source code and is not architecture-dependent for annotating parallelism. We used the C++ attribute mechanism to design a “de-facto” standard C++ embedded DSL named SPar. However, the implementation of DSLs using compiler-based tools is difficult, complicated, and usually requires a significant learning curve. This is even harder for those who are not familiar with compiler technology. Therefore, our motivation is to simplify this path for other researchers (experts in their domain) with support tools (our tool is CINCLE) to create high-level and productive DSLs through powerful and aggressive source-to-source transformations. In fact, parallel programmers can use their expertise without having to design and implement low-level code. The main goal of this thesis was to create a DSL and support tools for high-level stream parallelism in the context of a programming framework that is compiler-based and domain-oriented. Thus, we implemented SPar using CINCLE. SPar supports the software developer with productivity, performance, and code portability while CINCLE provides sufficient support to generate new DSLs. Also, SPar targets source-to-source transformation producing parallel pattern code built on top of FastFlow and MPI. Finally, we provide a full set of experiments showing that SPar provides better coding productivity without significant performance degradation in multi-core systems as well as transformation rules that are able to achieve code portability (for cluster architectures) through its generalized attributes.