The Manchester prototype dataflow computer
Communications of the ACM - Special section on computer architecture
Stored data structures on the Manchester dataflow machine
ISCA '86 Proceedings of the 13th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Methods for handling structures in data-flow systems
ISCA '85 Proceedings of the 12th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Sequential description and parallel execution language DFCII dataflow supercomputers
ICS '91 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Supercomputing
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Efficiency in vector handling is the key to obtaining high performance in numerical programs. So far, the main defect of dataflow computers is inefficiency in vector processing. We propose structure-flow processing as a new scheme for handling data structures such as vectors in dataflow architecture. The main objective of structure-flow processing is to enhance vector processing performance of a dataflow computer. In this structure-flow processing scheme, the arrival of a data structure unrolls the control structure which processes the data structure itself. A high-level structure is an implementation mechanism of a structure-flow scheme on a practical dataflow computer. Since all the computation is executed by instruction-level dataflow architecture, scalar level parallelism and function level parallelism are also fully utilized by this scheme. The SIGMA-1 architecture that supports high-level structure processing are discussed and the performance is measured. According to the measurement, vector programs can be executed three to four times faster than by unfolding using scalar dataflow processing.