A quantitative analysis of locality in dataflow programs

Substantial evidence suggests that exploiting some forms of locality within datajiow programs can impact performance dramatically. This is the basic premise of several hybrid von Neumann-dataflow or multithreaded architectures. Identifying and exploiting locality, however, in a jine-grained asynchronous execution model is not trivial. In this paper, jine grained intra-thread locality is defined, quantified and evaitiated. These experimental measurements are based on the evaluation of a set of numer+c and non-numeric benchmarks. The results point to a very large degree of thread locality: for example, over 70% of the instructions have to wait tess than 5 instruction execution steps for their input data. Furthermore, the remarkable uniformity and consistency of the distti”bution of thread locality across a wide vam”ety of benchmarks suggests that thread locality is highly dependent on the instruction set.

[1]  Guang R. Gao,et al.  A Novel High-Speed Memory Organization for Fine-Grain Multi-Thread Computing , 1991, PARLE.

[2]  D. E. Culler,et al.  RESOURCE MANAGEMENT FOR THE TAGGED TOKEN DATAFLOW ARCHITECTURE , 1985 .

[3]  David A. Patterson,et al.  Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach , 1969 .

[4]  Arthur H. Veen,et al.  Dataflow machine architecture , 1986, CSUR.

[5]  Robert A. Iannucci,et al.  A dataflow/von Neumann hybrid architecture , 1988 .

[6]  Keshav Pingali,et al.  I-structures: Data structures for parallel computing , 1986, Graph Reduction.

[7]  John R. Gurd,et al.  Iterative Instructions in the Manchester Dataflow Computer , 1990, IEEE Trans. Parallel Distributed Syst..

[8]  John Glauert,et al.  SISAL: streams and iteration in a single assignment language. Language reference manual, Version 1. 2. Revision 1 , 1985 .

[9]  V. Gerald Grafe,et al.  The Epsilon-2 Multiprocessor System , 1990, J. Parallel Distributed Comput..

[10]  David A. Padua,et al.  A Second Opinion on Data Flow Machines and Languages , 1982, Computer.

[11]  Toshitsugu Yuba,et al.  An Architecture Of A Dataflow Single Chip Processor , 1989, The 16th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture.

[12]  Arvind,et al.  Two Fundamental Issues in Multiprocessing , 1987, Parallel Computing in Science and Engineering.

[13]  Jean-Luc Gaudiot,et al.  Multi-Level Execution In Data-Flow Architectures , 1987, ICPP.

[14]  Stephen A. Brobst.  Organization of an Instruction Scheduling and Token Storage Unit in a Tagged Token Dataflow Machine , 1987, ICPP.