τ C: C with Process Network Extensions for Embedded Manycores

AbstractCurrent and future embedded manycore systems bring complex and heterogeneous architectures with a large number of processing cores, making both parallel programming at this scale and understanding the architecture itself a daunting task. Process Networks and other dataflow based Models of Computation (MoC) are a good base to present a universal model of the underlying manycore architectures to the programmer. If a language exposes a simple to grasp MoC in a consistent way across architectures, the programmer can concentrate the efforts on optimizing the expression of parallelism in the application instead of porting code to a given system. In this paper, we present a process network extension to C called τ C and its mapping to both a POSIX target and the P2012/STHORM platform, and show how the language offers an architecture independent solution of this problem