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Challenging the abstraction penalty in parallel patterns libraries

Adding FastFlow support to GrPPI

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Abstract

In the last years, pattern-based programming has been recognized as a good practice for efficiently exploiting parallel hardware resources. Following this approach, multiple libraries have been designed for providing such high-level abstractions to ease the parallel programming. However, those libraries do not share a common interface. To pave the way, GrPPI has been designed for providing an intermediate abstraction layer between application developers and existing parallel programming frameworks like OpenMP, Intel TBB or ISO C++ threads. On the other hand, FastFlow has been adopted as an efficient object-based programming framework that may benefit from being supported as an additional GrPPI backend. However, the object-based approach presents some major challenges to be incorporated under the GrPPI type safe functional programming style. In this paper, we present the integration of FastFlow as a new GrPPI backend to demonstrate that structured parallel programming frameworks perfectly fit the GrPPI design. Additionally, we also demonstrate that GrPPI does not incur in additional overheads for providing its abstraction layer, and we study the programmability in terms of lines of code and cyclomatic complexity. In general, the presented work acts as reciprocal validation of both FastFlow (as an efficient, native structured parallel programming framework) and GrPPI (as an efficient abstraction layer on top of existing parallel programming frameworks).

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Notes

  1. This pattern is not the titled Google’s MapReduce, which exploits key-value pairs to compute problems that can be parallelized by mapping a function over a given data set or stream of data, and then combining the results.

  2. GrPPI assumes all stream parallel computations are pipelines, whose first stage acts as stream generators and the last stage acts as stream absorber. In both cases, the stages may anyway implement some kind of computation on the generated/absorbed stream items.

  3. FastFlow provides two different Farm patterns: the ordered farm pattern preserves the input/output data stream ordering; the normal farm does not preserve it, for all those computations that, as an example, directly store results in shared memory and the order of the write/updates does not matter.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University Carlos III of Madrid, Leganes, Spain

    J. Daniel Garcia & David del Rio

  2. University of Torino, Turin, Italy

    Marco Aldinucci & Fabio Tordini

  3. University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Marco Danelutto, Gabriele Mencagli & Massimo Torquati

Authors
  1. J. Daniel Garcia
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  2. David del Rio
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  3. Marco Aldinucci
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  4. Fabio Tordini
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  5. Marco Danelutto
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  6. Gabriele Mencagli
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  7. Massimo Torquati
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to J. Daniel Garcia.

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This work has been partially supported by the European Commission EU H2020-ICT-2014-1 Project RePhrase (No. 644235) and by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through TIN2016-79637-P “Towards Unification of HPC and Big Data Paradigms”.

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Garcia, J.D., del Rio, D., Aldinucci, M. et al. Challenging the abstraction penalty in parallel patterns libraries. J Supercomput 76, 5139–5159 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-019-02826-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-019-02826-5

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