Actor fission transformations for executing dataflow programs on manycores

Abstract

Manycore architectures are dominating the development of advanced embedded computing due to the computational and power demand of high performance applications. This has introduced an additional complexity with regard to the efficient exploitation of the underlying hardware and the development of efficient parallel implementations. To tackle this we model applications using a dataflow programming language, perform high-level transformations of dataflow actors, and generate native code by using our compilation framework. This paper presents the actor fission transformations of our Cal2Many compilation framework. The transformations have facilitated the mapping of big dataflow actors on memory restricted embedded manycores, increased the utilization of the hardware, and enabled support for task and data-level parallelism. We have applied the actor transformations to two blocks of MPEG-4 decoder and executed it on the Epiphany manycore architecture. The result shows the practicality and feasibility of our approach.