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Programming heterogeneous systems has been greatly simplified by OpenCL, which provides a common low-level API for a large variety of compute devices. However, many low-level details, including data transfer, task scheduling, or synchronization, must still be managed by the application designer. Often, it is desirable to program heterogeneous systems in a higher-level language, making the developing process faster and less error-prone. In this paper, we introduce a framework to efficiently execute applications specified as synchronous dataflow graphs (SDF) on heterogeneous systems by means of OpenCL. In our approach, actors are embedded into OpenCL kernels and data channels are automatically instantiated to improve memory access latencies and end-to-end performance. The multi-level parallelism resulting from the hierarchical structure of heterogeneous systems is exploited by applying two …