Performance Estimation Based Multicriteria Partitioning Approach for Dynamic Dataflow Programs

The problem of partitioning a dataflow program onto a target architecture is a difficult challenge for any application design. In general, since the problem is NP-complete, it consists of looking for high quality solutions in terms of maximizing the achievable data throughput. The difficulty is given by the exploration of the design space which results in being extremely large for parallel platforms. The paper describes a heuristic partitioning methodology applicable to dynamic dataflow programs. The methodology is based on two elements: an execution model of the dynamic dataflow program which is used as estimation of the performance for the exploration of the large design space and several partitioning algorithms competing to lead to specific high quality solutions. Experimental results are validated with executions on a virtual platform.