Polyhedral process networks

Although parallel hardware has become ubiquitous, many designers still use sequential programming languages, which do not reveal the available parallelism in an application. However, if an application satisfies some constraints then a parallel specification can be derived automatically. In particular, if the application can be represented in the polyhedral model, then a polyhedral process network can be constructed from the application that exposes the task-level parallelism. The main challenge in this construction is the computation of bounds on the buffers of the communication channels between processes. We explain the main steps of the construction: dataflow analysis prescribes the communication channels; parametric counting determines the number of tokens in each channel at any given time during the execution of a given schedule; the computation of parametric upper bounds yields safe sizes for all communication channel buffers.status: publishe