Stream parallelism with ordered data constraints on multi-core systems

Abstract

It is often a challenge to keep input/output tasks/results in order for parallel computations over data streams, particularly when stateless task operators are replicated to increase parallelism when there are irregular tasks. Maintaining input/output order requires additional coding effort and may significantly impact the application’s actual throughput. Thus, we propose a new implementation technique designed to be easily integrated with any of the existing C++ parallel programming frameworks that support stream parallelism. In this paper, it is first implemented and studied using SPar, our high-level domain-specific language for stream parallelism. We discuss the results of a set of experiments with real-world applications revealing how significant performance improvements may be achieved when our proposed solution is integrated within SPar, especially for data compression applications. Also, we show the results of experiments performed after integrating our solution within FastFlow and TBB, revealing no significant overheads.