FastFlow

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{{description>Fastflow is a C++ pattern-based parallel programming framework based upon lock-free shared-memory multithreading}}
===== FastFlow (FF) =====


FastFlow (斋戒流) is a C++ parallel programming framework advocating high-level, pattern-based parallel programming. It chiefly supports streaming and data parallelism, targeting  heterogenous platforms composed of clusters of shared-memory platforms, possibly equipped with computing accelerators such as NVidia GPGPUs, Xeon Phi, Tilera TILE64. 

The main design philosophy of FastFlow is to provide application designers with key features for parallel programming (e.g. time-to-market, portability, efficiency and performance portability) via suitable parallel programming abstractions and a carefully designed run-time support.

==== Application scenarios ====

FastFlow is a general-purpose C++ programming framework for heterogenous parallel platforms. Like other high-level programming frameworks, such as Intel TBB and OpenMP, it simplifies the design and engineering of portable parallel applications. However, it has a clear edge in terms of expressiveness and performance with respect to other parallel programming frameworks in specific application scenarios, including, inter alia:

  * fine-grain parallelism on cache-coherent shared-memory platforms;
  * streaming applications;
  * coupled usage of multi-core and accelerators.

In other cases FastFlow is typically comparable to (and is some cases slightly faster than) state-of-the-art parallel programming frameworks such as Intel TBB, OpenMP, Cilk, etc. More details may be found on the [[ffnamespace:performance|performance]] page.
==== Design ====

FastFlow comes as a C++ template library designed as a [[ffnamespace:architecture|stack of layers]] that progressively abstracts out the programming of parallel applications. The goal of the stack is threefold: portability, extensibility, and performance. For this, all the three layers are realised as thin strata of C++ templates that are 1) seamlessly portable; 2) easily extended via subclassing; and 3) statically compiled and cross-optimised with the application. The terse design ensures easy portability on almost all OSes and CPUs with a C++ compiler. The main development platform is Linux/x86_64/gcc, but it has been tested also on various combinations of x86, x86_64, PPC, ARM, Tilera, NVidia with gcc, icc, Visual Studio on Linux, Mac OS, and Windows XP/7. The FastFlow core has been ported to ARM/iOS.

The FastFlow [[ffnamespace:architecture|run-time support]] uses several techniques to efficiently support fine  grain parallelism (and very high frequency streaming). Among these are:

  * non-blocking multi-threading with lock-less synchronisations;
  * zero-copy network messaging (via 0MQ/TCP and RDMA/Infiniband);
  * asynchronous data feeding for accelerator offloading.

 
FastFlow has been adopted by a number of research projects and third-party development initiatives, and has thus been tested in a variety of application scenarios: from systems biology to high-frequency trading. 

==== Big Pictures ====

^FastFlow big picture (2014)^Applications: lock-less Bowtie2 (2013)^Lock-less programming with FastFlow (2012) ^
|[[http://calvados.di.unipi.it/storage/paper_files/2014_ff_poster_hipeac.pdf|{{:ffnamespace:2014_ff_poster_hipeac.png?200}}]]|[[http://calvados.di.unipi.it/storage/paper_files/2013_ff_botie2_mem_affinity_acaces.pdf|{{:ffnamespace:2013_ff_botie2_mem_affinity_acaces.png?200}}]]|[[http://calvados.di.unipi.it/storage/paper_files/2012_ACACES_poster.pdf|{{:ffnamespace:2012_acaces_poster.png}}]]|


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FastFlow

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