Data-Driven Multithreading Programming Tool-chain

The increasing parallelism offered by the parallel architectures introduced by processor vendors, coupled with the need to extract more parallelism out of the applications, has led the community to examine more efficient programming and execution models. The Dataflow Multithreading model is known to be the model that can exploit the most parallelism out of a wide range of applications. The Dataflow Multithreading model is not new to the community and one of the main reasons it wasn’t widely spread among the user community is the programming effort it requires in order to exploit the maximum parallelism out of a Dataflow implementation. The wide spread of parallel machines today though has led many researchers to re-examine its applicability. In this work we explore the programmability of the Data-Driven Multithreading (DDM) model, a non-blocking execution model that applies the principles of Dataflow execution at a coarser granularity, that of sequence of instructions. In this paper we present a tool-chain that promises to ease the effort needed by the programmers to write efficient DDM applications that exploit the Dataflow execution model and in particular two implementations of the DDM model, the TFlux Architecture and the Data-Driven Multithreading Virtual Machine (DDM-VM). The tool-chain includes a set of programming directives, developed under the DDM C Preprocessor project and an Eclipse Plug-in suite that enables content assist while integrating directives in applications, a side panel with the available directives, their arguments and explanation for each one. Finally, the preprocessing procedure is integrated in the Eclipse editor to enable easy DDM application development regardless of the platform used.