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4.5 Boolean dataflow (BDF)

Boolean dataflow was developed by Joe Buck as part of his Ph.D. thesis research [Buc93c]. Like DDF, it supports run-time flow of control. Unlike DDF, it attempts to construct a compile-time schedule. Thus it achieves the efficiency of SDF with the generality of DDF. It currently supports a somewhat more limited range of stars than DDF, and does not support recursion, but the model of computation is, in principle, equally general. Its applications are the same as those of DDF.

The basic mechanism used in BDF is to construct an annotated schedule, by which we mean a static schedule where each firing in the schedule is annotated with the Boolean conditions under which it occurs. Thus, any sequence of firings can depend on a sequence of Boolean values computed during the execution. Executing the annotated schedule involves much less overhead than executing a dynamic dataflow schedule.



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