An Approach for Direct Dataflow Execution on Contemporary Multicore Systems

Traditionally, imperative programming uses a series of state-based operands to model control-flow and, as a result, suffers from the well-known von Neumann bottleneck. In contrast, dataflow programs are driven only by the availability of instruction operands. However, the lack of mainstream dataflow hardware hinders direct dataflow instruction execution. On the other hand, direct execution of dataflow programs on von Neumann machines incurs a high performance cost. In this paper, we present preliminary results on the direct execution of dataflow programs on multicore systems through emulation of tagged-tokens mechanism. Compared with direct translation of SISAL programs to C code, we achieved a speedup of 44 for CPU-intensive applications and 22 for memory-bounded applications on a 48-cores AMD NUMA system.