2009/09/07 by Aldinucci, Marco, Torquati, Massimo, Meneghin, Massimiliano
#C.1.3 #D.1.3 #D.3.2 #Distributed #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Parallel #Programming Languages (cs.PL) #and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0909.1187
Shared memory multiprocessors come back to popularity thanks to rapid spreading of commodity multi-core architectures. As ever, shared memory programs are fairly easy to write and quite hard to optimise; providing multi-core programmers with optimising tools and programming frameworks is a nowadays challenge. Few efforts have been done to support effective streaming applications on these architectures. In this paper we introduce FastFlow, a low-level programming framework based on lock-free queues explicitly designed to support high-level languages for streaming applications. We compare FastFlow with state-of-the-art programming frameworks such as Cilk, OpenMP, and Intel TBB. We experimentally demonstrate that FastFlow is always more efficient than all of them in a set of micro-benchmarks and on a real world application; the speedup edge of FastFlow over other solutions might be bold for fine grain tasks, as an example +35% on OpenMP, +226% on Cilk, +96% on TBB for the alignment of protein P01111 against UniProt DB using Smith-Waterman algorithm.