Abstract-We present a programming methodology and runtime performance case study comparing the declarative data flow coordination language S-NET with Intel's Concurrent Collections (CnC). As a coordination language S-NET achieves a near-complete separation of concerns between sequential software components implemented in a separate algorithmic language and their parallel orchestration in an asynchronous data flow streaming network.We investigate the merits of S-NET and CnC with the help of a relevant and non-trivial linear algebra problem: tiled Cholesky decomposition. We describe two alternative S-NET implementations of tiled Cholesky factorization and compare them with two CnC implementations, one with explicit performance tuning and one without, that have previously been used to illustrate Intel CnC. Our experiments on a 48-core machine demonstrate that S-NET manages to outperform CnC on this problem.
This is an evaluation study of the expressiveness provided and the performance delivered by the coordination language S-NET in comparison to Intel’s Concurrent Collections (CnC). An S-NET application is a network of black-box compute components connected through anonymous data streams, with the standard input and output streams linking the application to the environment. Our case study is based on two applications: a face detection algorithm implemented as a pipeline of feature classifiers and a numerical algorithm from the linear algebra domain, namely Cholesky decomposition. The selected applications are representative and have been selected by Intel researchers as evaluation testbeds for CnC in the past. We implement various versions of both algorithms in S-NET and compare them with equivalent CnC implementations, both with and without tuning, previously published by the CnC community. Our experiments on a large-scale server system demonstrate that S-Net delivers very similar scalability and absolute performance on the studied examples as tuned CnC codes do, even without specific tuning. At the same time, S-Net does achieve a much more complete separation of concerns between compute and coordination layers than CnC even intends to.
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