Accelerating Code on Multi-cores with FastFlow

FastFlow is a programming framework specifically target- ing cache-coherent shared-memory multi-cores. It is implemented as a stack of C++ template libraries built on top of lock-free (and mem- ory fence free) synchronization mechanisms. Its philosophy is to combine programmability with performance. In this paper a new FastFlow pro- gramming methodology aimed at supporting parallelization of existing sequential code via offloading onto a dynamically created software accel- erator is presented. The new methodology has been validated using a set of simple micro-benchmarks and some real applications.