Section: New Results

Generation of Parallel Code from Synchronous Programs

Participants : Albert Cohen [contact] , Léonard Gérard, Adrien Guatto, Nhat Minh Le, Marc Pouzet.

• Efficiently distributing synchronous programs is a challenging and long-standing subject. This paper introduces the use of futures in a Lustre-like language, giving the programmer control over the expression of parallelism. In the synchronous model where computations are considered instantaneous, futures increase expressiveness by decoupling the beginning from the end of a computation. Through a number of examples, we show how to desynchronize long computations and implement parallel patterns such as fork-join, pipelining and data parallelism. The proposed extension preserves the main static properties of the base language, including static resource bounds and the absence of deadlock, livelock and races. Moreover, we prove that adding or removing futures preserves the underlying synchronous semantics.

  This work has been presented at the ACM Intern. Conf. on Embedded Software (EMSOFT 2012), in October 2012 and it received the Best paper award.

  Further work along these lines is taking place, to generate code for a variety of low-overhead execution models, to cope with real-time constraints, and to formalize and prove the correctness of the underlying concurrent data structures. On the latter point, a paper has been accepted at the ACM Conf. PPoPP 2013.