Partitioning streaming parallelism for multi-cores: a machine learning based approach

• Authors: Zheng Wang;Michael F.P. O'Boyle
• Venue: Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Parallel architectures and compilation techniques
• Year: 2010

Stream based languages are a popular approach to expressing parallelism in modern applications. The efficient mapping of streaming parallelism to multi-core processors is, however, highly dependent on the program and underlying architecture. We address this by developing a portable and automatic compiler-based approach to partitioning streaming programs using machine learning. Our technique predicts the ideal partition structure for a given streaming application using prior knowledge learned off-line. Using the predictor we rapidly search the program space (without executing any code) to generate and select a good partition. We applied this technique to standard StreamIt applications and compared against existing approaches. On a 4-core platform, our approach achieves 60% of the best performance found by iteratively compiling and executing over 3000 different partitions per program. We obtain, on average, a 1.90x speedup over the already tuned partitioning scheme of the StreamIt compiler. When compared against a state-of-the-art analytical, model-based approach, we achieve, on average, a 1.77x performance improvement. By porting our approach to a 8-core platform, we are able to obtain 1.8x improvement over the StreamIt default scheme, demonstrating the portability of our approach.