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