A multiple processor data flow machine that supports generalized procedures

  • Authors:

  • Arvind;Vinod Kathail

  • Affiliations:

  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • ISCA '81 Proceedings of the 8th annual symposium on Computer Architecture
  • Year:
  • 1981

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.01

Visualization

Abstract

Programs for data flow machines are written in functional languages, some of which require efficient support for dynamic procedure invocation to achieve high performance and programming flexibility. Among the proposed data flow machines, few support procedures in any generality. Our machine, which is a hardware realization of the U-interpreter for data flow languages, provides support for a variety of procedure calling conventions. Because the U-interpreter assigns a unique activity name to each instance of a computation (activity), an activity name may become arbitrarily large in the case of nested or recursive procedure calls. Hardware considerations, however, require that an activity name be represented by a fixed-size tag. We describe a mechanism that uses fixed-size, reusable tags in hardware. Like processor and memory resources, a group of tags is allocated and deallocated for each procedure activation. The proposed mechanism passes procedure arguments and results efficiently, given the distributed environment of our machine.