A Communication Library for Mapping Dataflow Applications on Manycore Architectures

Dataflow programming is a promising paradigm for high performance embedded parallel computing. When mapping a dataflow program onto a manycore architecture a key component is the library to express the communication between the actors. In this paper we present a dataflow communication library supporting the CAL actor language. A first implementation of the communication library is created for Adapteva’s manycore architecture Epiphany that contains an onchip 2-D mesh network. Three different buffering methods, with and without direct memory access (DMA) transfer, have been implemented and evaluated. We have also made a preliminary study on the effect of mapping strategies of the actors onto the cores. The assessment of the library is based on a CAL implementation of a two dimensional inverse discrete cosine transform (2D-IDCT) and our own CAL-to-C compilation framework. As expected the results show that the most efficient actor to-core mapping strategy is to keep the communication to the nearest neighbor communication pattern as much as possible. Thus, the best way to place a pipelined sequence of computations like our 2D-IDCT is to place the actors into cores in a serpentine fashion. For this application we found that the simple receiver side buffer outperforms the more complicated buffering strategies that used DMA transfer.