Simplified High Level Parallelism Expression on Heterogeneous Systems through Data Partition Pattern Description

Abstract

Abstract With the development of heterogeneous systems, the demand for high-level programming methods that ease heterogeneous programming and produce portable applications has become more urgent. This paper proposes DACL, the data associated computing language. DACL introduces data partition patterns to achieve architecture-independent parallelism expression. Meanwhile, DACL provides simplified language extensions, as well as programming features such as serialization of the computing process, parameterization of data attributes and modularity, thus reducing the difficulty of heterogeneous programming and improving programming productivity. The operational semantics show that DACL enables different levels of parallelism degree calculation and retains data access patterns, reserving optimization potential. To support cross-platform execution, the currently implemented source-to-source compilers employ OpenMP and OpenCL as the backend. We reconstructed multiple benchmarks selected from the Parboil and Rodinia benchmark suits with DACL and conducted a comparison test on CPU, GPU and MIC platforms. The code size of each rebuilt benchmark is roughly equivalent to that of the serial code, which is only 13%–64% of the benchmark OpenCL code. With the support of the compilation system, the reconstructed code can execute on different processors without modification, yielding a competitive or better performance to that of the manually written benchmark code.