DDMCPP: The Data-Driven Multithreading C Pre-Processor

Single thread performance improvement using more complex structures and higher frequencies is currently reaching its limits. As such, several architectures that target this problem through exploiting coarse grainedmultithreading have been proposed. Such an architecture is the DataDriven Multithreading Chip Multiprocessor (DDM-CMP) which is based on a dataflow-like model of execution. To fully explore the benefits of a new architecture an automated compiler is required. As a fully automated tool requires tremendous effort, semi-automated solutions are often the first approach. In this paper we present the DDM C Pre-Processor (DDMCPP), a specialized tool that allows easy programming for the DDM-CMP architecture. The only responsibility of the programmer is to express the available parallelism using special directives. DDMCPP then coverts the code into a C program able to compile for the DDM-CMP architecture using a commodity compiler.