Bridging a Data-Flow Execution Model to a Lightweight Programming Model

Starting from a Data-Flow execution model called “DF-Threads”, we defined a minimalistic API to enable an efficient implementation in the hardware of the distribution of the threads across the cores of a single multi-core system and across the remote cores of a cluster. We aim at proposing this API as a simple programming model in C language that can potentially permit an easy interface between DF-Threads and generic programming models. Clusters are typically programmed with MPI, therefore we evaluated our approach against OpenMPI. If we consider the delivered GFLOPS per core, DF-Threads are also competitive in respect to CUDA. In the basic examples, that we used in this initial investigation, DF-Threads achieve better performance-per-core compared to OpenMPI and CUDA. In particular, OpenMPI has a large portion of OS-kernel activity, which is slowing down its performance.