Towards automatic parallelization of stream processing applications

Abstract

Parallelizing and optimizing codes for recent multi-/many-core processors have been recognized to be a complex task. For this reason, strategies to automatically transform sequential codes into parallel and discover optimization opportunities are crucial to relieve the burden to developers. In this paper, we present a compile-time framework to (semi) automatically find parallel patterns (Pipeline and Farm) and transform sequential streaming applications into parallel using GrPPI, a generic parallel pattern interface. This framework uses a novel pipeline stage-balancing technique which provides the code generator module with the necessary information to produce balanced pipelines. The evaluation, using a synthetic video benchmark and a real-world computer vision application, demonstrates that the presented framework is capable of producing parallel and optimized versions of the application. A comparison study under several thread-core oversubscribed conditions reveals that the framework can bring comparable performance results with respect to the Intel TBB programming framework.This work was supported in part by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad through the Project Toward Uni cation of HPC and Big Data Paradigms under Grant TIN2016-79637-P and in part by the EU Project RePhrase: REfactoring Parallel Heterogeneous Resource-Aware Applications under Grant ICT 644235