Structured parallel programming with “core” FastFlow

Abstract

FastFlow is an open source, structured parallel programming framework originally conceived to support highly efficient stream parallel computation while targeting shared memory multi cores. Its efficiency mainly comes from the optimized implementation of the base communication mechanisms and from its layered design. FastFlow eventually provides the parallel applications programmers with a set of readyto- use, parametric algorithmic skeletons modeling the most common parallelism exploitation patterns. The algorithmic skeleton provided by FastFlow may be freely nested to model more and more complex parallelism exploitation patterns. This tutorial describes the “core” FastFlow, that is the set of skeletons supported since version 1.0 in FastFlow, and outlines the recent advances aimed at (i) introducing new, higher level skeletons and (ii) targeting networked multi cores, possibly equipped with GPUs, in addition to single multi/many core processing elements.