Static Mapping of Functional Programs: An Example in Signal Processing

Issue title: High-Performance Functional Computing

Article type: Research Article

Authors: DENNIS, JACK B.

Affiliations: MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, Cambridge, MA 02139

Abstract: Complex signal-processing problems are naturally described by compositions of program modules that process streams of data. In this article we discuss how such compositions may be analyzed and mapped onto multiprocessor computers to effectively exploit the massive parallelism of these applications. The methods are illustrated with an example of signal processing for an optical surveillance problem. Program transformation and analysis are used to construct a program description tree that represents the given computation as an acyclic interconnection of stream-processing modules. Each module may be mapped to a set of threads run on a group of processing elements of a target multiprocessor. Performance is considered for two forms of multiprocessor architecture, one based on conventional DSP technology and the other on a multithreaded-processing element design.

Journal: Scientific Programming, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 121-135, 1996