A domain-specific high-level programming model

Abstract

International audienceNowadays, computing hardware continues to move toward more parallelism and more heterogeneity, to obtain more computing power. From personal computers to supercomputers, we can find several levels of parallelism expressed by the interconnections of multi-core and many-core accelerators. On the other hand, computing software needs to adapt to this trend, and programmers can use parallel programming models (PPM) to fulfil this difficult task. There are different PPMs available that are based on tasks, directives, or low level languages or library. These offer higher or lower abstraction levels from the architecture by handling their own syntax. However, to offer an efficient PPM with a greater (additional) high-levelabstraction level while saving on performance, one idea is to restrict this to a specific domain and to adapt it to a family of applications. In the present study, we propose a high-level PPM specific to digital signal processing applications. It is based on data-flow graph models of computation, and a dynamic runtime model of execution (StarPU). We show how the user can easily express this digital signal processing application, and can take advantage of task, data and graph parallelism in the implementation, to enhance the performances of targeted heterogeneous clusters composed of CPUs and different accelerators (e.g., GPU, Xeon Phi