Ubiquitous Stream Programming to Facilitate the Migration to Multicore Architectures

The goal of the StreamIt project is to become the language of choice for streaming applications, which include multimedia codes, as well as cryptography, networking and security, and some forms of scientific computation. StreamIt provides a high level stream language and a stream-aware compiler that leverages domain specific language constructs to deliver high performance from high levels of abstraction. We believe that StreamIt will lead to a dramatic improvement in programmer productivity, program robustness, portability, and performance scalability on commodity multicore architectures. A key component of the research is to also provide seamless integration with other programming practices, because large applications have various properties that may require different language abstractions. This paper outlines a methodology that allows StreamIt programs to run as part of the X10 virtual machine. X10 is one of three general purpose languages under development from vendors designing large scale parallel platforms. 1