ADVANCES IN THE DATAFLOW COMPUTATIONAL MODEL

by Walid A. Najjar, Edward A. Lee, and Guang R. Gao

Parallel Computing, Volume 25, 1999, pp. 1907-1929 (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/parco)

Prepublished version
Published version

ABSTRACT

The dataflow program graph execution model, or dataflow for short, is an alternative to the stored-program (von Neumann) execution model. Because it relies on a graph representation of programs, the strengths of the dataflow model are very much the complements of those of the stored-program one. In the last thirty or so years since it was proposed, the dataflow model of computation has been used and developed in very many areas of computing research: from programming languages to processor design, and from signal processing to reconfigurable computing. This paper is a review of the current state-of-the-art in the applications of the dataflow model of computation. It focuses on three areas: multithreaded computing, signal processing and reconfigurable computing.

Keywords: Computational models; Dataflow; Multithreaded computer architecture; von Neumann computer; Dataflow history; Memory models

Send comments to Edward A. Lee, eal at eecs berkeley edu