2019/02/27 by Tal Ben‐Nun, Johannes de Fine Licht, Ben-Nun, Tal +7 · 13 citations
Computer Science · #Cloud Computing and Resource Management #Distributed #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Graph Theory and Algorithms #Parallel #Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques #Performance (cs.PF) #Programming Languages (cs.PL) #and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1902.10345
openalex publication_date 2019/02/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The ubiquity of accelerators in high-performance computing has driven programming complexity beyond the skill-set of the average domain scientist. To maintain performance portability in the future, it is imperative to decouple architecture-specific programming paradigms from the underlying scientific computations. We present the Stateful DataFlow multiGraph (SDFG), a data-centric intermediate representation that enables separating program definition from its optimization. By combining fine-grained data dependencies with high-level control-flow, SDFGs are both expressive and amenable to program transformations, such as tiling and double-buffering. These transformations are applied to the SDFG in an interactive process, using extensible pattern matching, graph rewriting, and a graphical user interface. We demonstrate SDFGs on CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs over various motifs --- from fundamental computational kernels to graph analytics. We show that SDFGs deliver competitive performance, allowing domain scientists to develop applications naturally and port them to approach peak hardware performance without modifying the original scientific code.