Detecting data-parallel synchronous dataflow graphs

Abstract

Synchronous Dataflow (SDF), a popular subset of the dataflow programming paradigm, gives a well structured formalism to capture signal and stream processing applications. With data-parallel architectures becoming ubiquitous, several frameworks leverage the SDF formalism to map applications to parallel architectures. But, these frameworks assume that the Synchronous Dataflow graphs (SDFGs) under consideration already are data-parallel. In this paper, we address the lack of mechanisms required to detect if an SDFG can be executed in a data-parallel fashion. We develop necessary and sufficient conditions that an SDFG must satisfy for its data-parallel execution. In addition, we develop methods that detect and transform SDFGs that cannot be determined to be data-parallel through visual graph inspection alone. We report on a prototype implementation of the developed conditions as a compiler pass in PREESM framework and test them against some useful applications expressed as an SDFG.