Stream Programming Model

• William Thies. Language and Compiler Support for Stream Programs. Ph.D. Dissertation, MIT. February 2009.

1. "Computer architectures are becoming multicore."
2. "Computer applications are becoming embedded and data-centric."
3. "Finally, there are rare cases in which the structured primitives in StreamIt have been inadequate

for representing a streaming communication pattern. Figure 2-20 illustrates an example from video compression, where each parallel filter performs a motion prediction for a fixed area of the screen. Between successive frames, each filters shares its prediction with its neighbors on either side. While this could be represented with a feedback loop around the entire computation, there would be complicated interleaving involved. This case reflects a broader shortcoming, discussed in Section 2.7, that StreamIt is not designed for multidimensional data processing." (p.49)