Stream Virtual Machine and Two-Level Compilation Model for Streaming Architectures and Languages

This paper summarizes and includes some text from the prior work The Stream Virtual Machine, by François Labonté, Ian Buck, Peter Mattson, Christos Kozyrakis, and Mark Horowitz, presented at PACT 2004. The stream computing paradigm separates the application's computational kernels from communication streams, matching the structure and performance constraints of modern multiprocessors and data intensive applications with regular communication patterns. The multitude of stream architectures and languages create interoperability problems and cause duplication of compiler and tool development efforts. To address this, the Morphware Forum [8] is developing a two-level complication process, whereby a language-specific high-level compiler interfaces with an architecture-specific low-level compiler using an architecture model and Streaming Virtual Machine [7] code. We describe this interface and highlight the challenges of this approach.