PRUNE: Dynamic and Decidable Dataflow for Signal Processing on Heterogeneous Platforms

TL;DR

PRUNE introduces a dynamic, decidable dataflow model for signal processing on heterogeneous platforms, enabling full utilization of CPUs and GPUs with guaranteed deadlock freedom and bounded memory, demonstrated through real-world applications.

Contribution

It presents a novel dynamic dataflow model and formal design rules that ensure decidability and analyzability for heterogeneous signal processing applications.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art in analyzability, flexibility, and performance.

Enables full utilization of heterogeneous CPU and GPU resources.

Provides a practical open-source environment for complex signal processing applications.

Abstract

The majority of contemporary mobile devices and personal computers are based on heterogeneous computing platforms that consist of a number of CPU cores and one or more Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). Despite the high volume of these devices, there are few existing programming frameworks that target full and simultaneous utilization of all CPU and GPU devices of the platform. This article presents a dataflow-flavored Model of Computation (MoC) that has been developed for deploying signal processing applications to heterogeneous platforms. The presented MoC is dynamic and allows describing applications with data dependent run-time behavior. On top of the MoC, formal design rules are presented that enable application descriptions to be simultaneously dynamic and decidable. Decidability guarantees compile-time application analyzability for deadlock freedom and bounded memory. The presented MoC and the design rules are realized in a novel Open Source programming environment "PRUNE" and demonstrated with representative application examples from the domains of image processing, computer vision and wireless communications. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art in analyzability, flexibility and performance.