Realizing Efficient Execution of Dataflow Actors on Manycores
Essayas Gebrewahid, Mingkun Yang, Gustav Cedersjö, Zain Ul-Abdin, Verónica Gaspes, Jörn W. Janneck, Bertil Svensson · 2014
Embedded DSP computing is currently shifting towards manycore architectures in order to cope with the ever growing computational demands. Actor based dataflow languages are being considered as a programming model. In this paper we present a code generator for CAL, one such dataflow language. We propose to use a compilation tool with two intermediate representations. We start from a machine model of the actors that provides an ordering for testing of conditions and firing of actions. We then generate an Action Execution Intermediate Representation that is closer to a sequential imperative language like C and Java. We describe our two intermediate representations and show the feasibility and portability of our approach by compiling a CAL implementation of the Two-Dimensional Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform on a general purpose processor, on the Epiphany manycore architecture and on the Ambric massively parallel processor array.