DRT: A Lightweight Runtime for Developing Benchmarks for a Dataflow Execution Model

Future computers may take advantage of a dataflow program execution model (PXM) for both performance and energy advantages. One key element to provide a compilation tool-chain for such machines is a framework for developing initial benchmarks. DRT (Dataflow Run-Time) is a tool that enables the fast prototyping of those benchmarks for the Dataflow Threads (DF-Threads) PXM. In this work, we show how to use DRT to develop dataflow based examples to be targeted by a future compiler for the dataflow PXM. DRT has been written in portable C code (tested with the GNU C compiler), and it is open-source, therefore, it can be used on real machines based on architectures like x86, AArch, RISC-V ISA. Here, we discuss some didactic examples, and we show how to study and debug the data exchange, which is flowing through frames that are detached from the data stack. We compare DRT against similar dataflow runtime libraries such as DARTS and OCR. Even though our environment is not yet optimized, we found that DRT outperforms the above runtime frameworks in terms of execution time. We also give an evaluation of the time and complexity to develop DF-Threads examples in DRT compared to the approach of using a full system simulator and FPGAs for more accurate modeling.