Stream Programming: Luring Programmers into the Multicore Era

As the computer industry has moved to multicore processors, the
historic trend of exponential performance improvements will now depend
on ordinary programmers and their ability to parallelize their code.
However, most programmers are already overwhelmed by the complexity of
modern software and are unwilling to expend extra effort on
parallelization.  Hence, for programmers to embrace a parallel
abstraction, we believe that it must come with new
capabilities--unrelated to parallelism--that simplify application
development and lure programmers into changing their ways.

In this talk, I will describe stream programming: an inherently
parallel model that also offers powerful new capabilities for the
domain of multimedia, graphics, and digital signal processing (DSP).
Programs with a streaming structure are naturally parallelized on a
multicore target.  At the same time, streaming language abstractions
enable the compiler to automate tasks that are typically performed by
a DSP expert, including whole-program algebraic simplification and
translation from the time domain to the frequency domain.  By
automating such transformations, stream programming reduces the
overall burden on programmers and enables them to transition to the
multicore era.