Task and Conduit Framework for Multi-core Systems

Processor manufacturers have turned from driving clock speed higher to building multi-core systems for improving performance. This paradigm shift by hardware manufacturers means that the software community can no longer count on advances in the hardware to improve application performance. The free lunch is indeed over, and mainstream developers now have to deal with issues of concurrency and parallel programming. It is imperative that programming models, tools and languages evolve to simplify the task of programming these multi-core systems. MIT Lincoln Laboratory is developing the parallel vector tile optimizing library (PVTOL), which provides a means of writing high performance code that is portable across a range of traditional and multi-core architectures. The task and conduit framework in PVTOL provides the foundation for exploiting task parallelism, and increases productivity by providing a set of high-level programming constructs.