sudison/RaftLib

RaftLib is a C++ Library for enabling stream/data-flow parallel computation. Using simple right shift operators (just like the C++ streams that you would use for string manipulation), you can link parallel compute kernels together. With RaftLib, we do away with explicit use of pthreads, std::thread, OpenMP, or any other parallel "threading" library. These are often mis-used, creating non-deterministic behavior. RaftLib's model allows lock-free FIFO-like access to the communications channels connecting each compute kernel. The full system has many auto-parallelization, optimization, and convenience features that enable relatively simple authoring of performant applications. This project is currently in the alpha stage. The beta release will bring back multi-node support, along with (planned) container support for the remote machines. Feel free to give it a shot, if you have any issues, also feel free to send the authors an e-mail.

User Group / Mailing List: slack channel

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Build status

Pre-requisites

OS X & Linux

Compiler: c++14 capable -> Clang, GNU GCC 5.0+, or Intel icc

Windows

Latest merge from pull request to main should enable compilation on VS on Win10.

Install

Make a build directory (for the instructions below, we'll write [build]). If you want to build the OpenCV example, then you'll need to add to your cmake invocation:

-DBUILD_WOPENCV=true

To use the QThreads User space HPC threading library you will need to add the following (NOTE: The qthread library currently uses its own partitioner and does not work with Scotch, it also has issues with OpenCV, will fix in next release iteration):

-DUSEQTHREAD=1

Building the examples, benchmarks and tests can be disabled using:

-DBUILD_EXAMPLES=false
-DBUILD_BENCHMARKS=false
-DBUILD_TESTS=false

To build:

mkdir [build]
cd [build]
cmake ..
make && make test
sudo make install

NOTE: The default prefix in the makefile is:

PREFIX ?= /usr/local

Using

When building applications with RaftLib, on Linux it is best to use the pkg-config file, as an example, using the poc.cpp example,

g++ `pkg-config --cflags raftlib` poc.cpp -o poc `pkg-config --libs raftlib`

Feel free to substitute your favorite build tool. I use Ninja and make depending on which machine I'm on. To change out, use cmake to generate the appropriate build files with the -Gxxx flag.

Citation

If you use this framework for something that gets published, please cite it as:

@article{blc16,
  author = {Beard, Jonathan C and Li, Peng and Chamberlain, Roger D},
  title = {RaftLib: A C++ Template Library for High Performance Stream Parallel Processing},
  year = {2016},
  doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1094342016672542},
  eprint = {http://hpc.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/10/18/1094342016672542.full.pdf+html},
  journal = {International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications}
}

Other Info Sources

OpenCV wrappers for RaftLib
Project web page
Project wiki page
Blog post intro
Jonathan Beard's thesis
Views on parallel computing, general philosphy
Feel free to e-mail one of the authors of the repo

sudison / RaftLib