The Design and Implementation of TIDeFlow: A Dataflow-Inspired Execution Model for Parallel Loops and Task Pipelining

This paper provides an extended description of the design and implementation of the Time Iterated Dependency Flow (TIDeFlow) execution model. TIDeFlow is a dataflow-inspired model that simplifies the scheduling of shared resources on many-core processors. To accomplish this, programs are specified as directed graphs and the dataflow model is extended through the introduction of intrinsic constructs for parallel loops and the arbitrary pipelining of operations. The main contributions of this paper are: (1) a formal description of the TIDeFlow execution model and its programming model, (2) a description of the TIDeFlow implementation and its strengths over previous execution models, such as the ability to natively express parallel loops and task pipelining, (3) an analysis of experimental results showing the advantages of TIDeFlow with respect to expressing parallel programs on many-core architectures and (4) a presentation of the implementation of a low overhead runtime system for TIDeFlow.