Section: Research Program

Definition of dataflow representations of parallel programs

In the last decades, several frameworks have emerged to design efficient compiler algorithms. The efficiency of all the optimizations performed in compilers strongly relies on effective static analyses and intermediate representations. Dataflow models are a natural intermediate representation for hardware compilers (HLS) and more generally for parallelizing compilers. Indeed, dataflow models capture task-level parallelism and can be mapped naturally to parallel architectures. In a way, a dataflow model is a partition of the computation into processes and a partition of the flow dependences into channels. This partitioning prepares resource allocation (which processor/hardware to use) and medium-grain communications.

The main goal of the CASH team is to provide efficient analyses and the optimizing compilation frameworks for dataflow programming models. The results of the team will rely on programming languages and representation of programs in which parallelism and dataflow play a crucial role. This first research direction aims at defining these dataflow languages and intermediate representations, both from a practical perspective (syntax or structure), and from a theoretical point of view (semantics). This first research direction thus defines the models on which the other directions will rely. It is important to note that we do not restrict ourself to a strict definition of dataflow languages and, more generally, we are interested in the parallel languages in which dataflow synchronization plays a significant role.

Intermediate dataflow model. The intermediate dataflow model is a representation of the program that is adapted for optimization and scheduling. It will be obtained from the analysis of a (parallel or sequential) program and should at some point be used for compilation. The dataflow model must specify precisely its semantics and parallelism granularity. It must also be analyzable with polyhedral techniques, where powerful concepts exist to design compiler analysis, e.g., scheduling or resource allocation. Polyhedral Process Networks [55] extended with a module system could be a good starting point. But then, how to fit non-polyhedral parts of the program? A solution is to hide non-polyhedral parts into processes with a proper polyhedral abstraction. This organization between polyhedral and non-polyhedral processes will be a key aspect of our medium-grain dataflow model. The design of our intermediate dataflow model and the precise definition of its semantics will constitute a reliable basis to formally define and ensure the correctness of algorithms proposed by CASH: compilation, optimizations and analyses.

Dataflow programming languages. Dataflow paradigm has also been explored quite intensively in programming languages. Indeed, there exists a large panel of dataflow languages, whose characteristics differ notably, the major point of variability being the scheduling of agents and their communications. There is indeed a continuum from the synchronous dataflow languages like Lustre  [37] or Streamit  [51], where the scheduling is fully static, and general communicating networks like KPNs  [39] or RVC-Cal  [19] where a dedicated runtime is responsible for scheduling tasks dynamically, when they can be executed. These languages share some similarities with actor languages that go even further in the decoupling of processes by considering them as independent reactive entities. Another objective of the CASH team is to study dataflow programming languages, their semantics, their expressiveness, and their compilation. The specificity of the CASH team will be that these languages will be designed taking into consideration the compilation using polyhedral techniques. In particular, we will explore which dataflow constructs are better adapted for our static analysis, compilation, and scheduling techniques. In practice we want to propose high-level primitives to express data dependency, this way the programmer will express parallelism in a dataflow way instead of the classical communication-oriented dependencies. The higher-level more declarative point of view will make programming easier but also give more optimization opportunities. These primitives will be inspired by the existing works in the polyhedral model framework, as well as dataflow languages, but also in the actors and active object languages  [26] that nowadays introduce more and more dataflow primitives to enable data-driven interactions between agents, particularly with futures  [24], [31].

Expected Impact

Consequently, the impact of this research direction is both the usability of our representation for static analyses and optimizations performed in Sections 3.2 and 3.3, and the usability of its semantics to prove the correctness of these analyses.

Scientific Program

Short-term and ongoing activities.

We obtained preliminary experimental  [16], [17], [32] and theoretical  [38] results, exploring several aspects of dataflow models. The next step is to define accurately the intermediate dataflow model and to study existing programming and execution models:

• Define our medium-grain dataflow model. So far, a modular Polyhedral Process Networks appears as a natural candidate but it may need to be extended to be adapted to a wider range of applications. Precise semantics will have to be defined for this model to ensure the articulation with the activities discussed in Section 3.3.

• Study precisely existing dataflow languages, their semantics, their programmability, and their limitations.

Medium-term activities.

In a second step, we will extend the existing results to widen the expressiveness of our intermediate representation and design new parallelism constructs. We will also work on the semantics of dataflow languages:

• Propose new stream programming models and a clean semantics where all kinds of parallelisms are expressed explicitly, and where all activities from code design to compilation and scheduling can be clearly expressed.

• Identify a core language that is rich enough to be representative of the dataflow languages we are interested in, but abstract and small enough to enable formal reasoning and proofs of correctness for our analyses and optimizations.

Long-term activities.

In a longer-term vision, the work on semantics, while remaining driven by the applications, would lead to to more mature results, for instance:

• Design more expressive dataflow languages and intermediate representations which would at the same time be expressive enough to capture all the features we want for aggressive HPC optimizations, and sufficiently restrictive to be (at least partially) statically analyzable at a reasonable cost.

• Define a module system for our medium-grain dataflow language. A program will then be divided into modules that can follow different compilation schemes and execution models but still communicate together. This will allow us to encapsulate a program that does not fit the polyhedral model into a polyhedral one and vice versa. Also, this will allow a compositional analysis and compilation, as opposed to global analysis which is limited in scalability.