Reducing memory requirements of stream programs by graph transformations

Stream languages explicitly describe fork-join parallelism and pipelines, offering a powerful programming model for many-core Multi-Processor Systems on Chip (MPSoC). In an embedded resource-constrained system, adapting stream programs to fit memory requirements is particularly important. In this paper we present a new approach to reduce the memory footprint required to run stream programs on MPSoC. Through an exploration of equivalent program variants, the method selects parallel code minimizing memory consumption. For large program instances, a heuristic accelerating the exploration phase is proposed and evaluated. We demonstrate the interest of our method on a panel of ten significant benchmarks. Using a multi-core modulo scheduling technique, our approach lowers considerably the minimal amount of memory required to run seven of these benchmarks while preserving throughput.