Programming & Implementation of Streaming Applications

Streaming applications like multimedia and radar signal processing applications are becoming increasingly compute-intensive. To overcome the computational demands new parallel architectures are emerging. The programming tools provided with these architectures require low-level programming, which creates a need for a common high-level architecture independent language that can exploit parallelism efficiently. One such language is StreamIt, designed around the notions of streams and stream transformers, which allows efficient mapping to a variety of architectures. The overall goal of this master’s thesis is to evaluate the StreamIt language from a programmability and portability point of view. An MPD-application has been developed in StreamIt, which is executed on the RAW simulator. Furthermore, a code generator is designed to compile and execute the application on the XPP simulator. The conclusions drawn are that StreamIt is easy to learn, but hard to use because of its programming paradigm as compared to conventional languages. StreamIt programming involves thinking in terms of streams instead of globally accessed memory. The structure of StreamIt makes it easy to reuse components and modify the application. The construction of the compiler makes it possible to port StreamIt application to various architectures