S+Net: extending functional coordination with extra-functional semantics

This technical report introduces S+Net, a compositional coordination language for streaming networks with extra-functional semantics. Compositionality simplifies the specification of complex parallel and distributed applications; extra-functional semantics allow the application designer to reason about and control resource usage, performance and fault handling. The key feature of S+Net is that functional and extra-functional semantics are defined orthogonally from each other. S+Net can be seen as a simultaneous simplification and extension of the existing coordination language S-Net, that gives control of extra-functional behavior to the S-Net programmer. S+Net can also be seen as a transitional research step between S-Net and AstraKahn, another coordination language currently being designed at the University of Hertfordshire. In contrast with AstraKahn which constitutes a re-design from the ground up, S+Net preserves the basic operational semantics of S-Net and thus provides an incremental introduction of extra-functional control in an existing language.Comment: 34 pages, 11 figures, 3 table

S-Net for multi-memory multicores

Copyright ACM, 2010. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Declarative Aspects of Multicore Programming: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1708046.1708054S-Net is a declarative coordination language and component technology aimed at modern multi-core/many-core architectures and systems-on-chip. It builds on the concept of stream processing to structure dynamically evolving networks of communicating asynchronous components. Components themselves are implemented using a conventional language suitable for the application domain. This two-level software architecture maintains a familiar sequential development environment for large parts of an application and offers a high-level declarative approach to component coordination. In this paper we present a conservative language extension for the placement of components and component networks in a multi-memory environment, i.e. architectures that associate individual compute cores or groups thereof with private memories. We describe a novel distributed runtime system layer that complements our existing multithreaded runtime system for shared memory multicores. Particular emphasis is put on efficient management of data communication. Last not least, we present preliminary experimental data

A Case Study in Coordination Programming: Performance Evaluation of S-Net vs Intel's Concurrent Collections

We present a programming methodology and runtime performance case study comparing the declarative data flow coordination language S-Net with Intel's Concurrent Collections (CnC). As a coordination language S-Net achieves a near-complete separation of concerns between sequential software components implemented in a separate algorithmic language and their parallel orchestration in an asynchronous data flow streaming network. We investigate the merits of S-Net and CnC with the help of a relevant and non-trivial linear algebra problem: tiled Cholesky decomposition. We describe two alternative S-Net implementations of tiled Cholesky factorization and compare them with two CnC implementations, one with explicit performance tuning and one without, that have previously been used to illustrate Intel CnC. Our experiments on a 48-core machine demonstrate that S-Net manages to outperform CnC on this problem.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, 1 table, accepted for PLC 2014 worksho

Statistical performance analysis with dynamic workload using S-NET

Volkmar Wieser, Philip K. F. Hölzenspies, Michael Roßbory, and Raimund Kirner, 'Statistical performance analysis with dynamic workload using S-NET'. Paper presented at the Workshop on Feedback-Directed Compiler Optimization for Multi-Core Architectures. Paris, France 23-25 January 2012In this paper the ADVANCE approach for engineering con- current software systems with well-balanced hardware ef- ficiency is adressed using the stream processing language S-Net. To obtain the cost information in the concurrent system the metrics throughput, latency, and jitter are evalu- ated by analyzing generated synthetical data as well as using an industrial related application in the future. As fall-out an Eclipse plugin for S-Net has been developed to provide sup- port for syntax highlighting, content assistance, hover help, and more, for easier and faster development. The presented results of the current work are on the one hand an indicator for the status quo of the ADVANCE vision and on the other hand used to improve the applied statistical analysis tech- niques within ADVANCE. Like the ADVANCE project, this work is still under development, but further improvements and speedups are expected in the near future

Statistical Performance Analysis of an Ant-Colony Optimisation Application in S-NET

Kenneth MacKenzie, Philip K. F. Hölzenspies, Kevin Hammond, Raimund Kirner, Vu Thien Nga Nguyen, Iraneus te Boekhorst, Clemens Grelck, Raphael Poss, Merijn Verstraaten, 'Statistical Performance Analysis of an Ant-Colony Optimisation Application in S-NET'. Paper presented at the 2nd Workshop on Feedback-Directed Compiler Optimization for Multi-Core Architectures. Berlin, Germany, 12 January 2013.We consider an ant-colony optimsation problem implemented on a multicore system as a collection of asynchronous stream- processing components under the control of the S-NET coordina- tion language. Statistical analysis and visualisation techniques are used to study the behaviour of the application, and this enables us to discover and correct problems in both the application program and the run-time system underlying S-NET