Abstract
Computers employing some degree of data flow organisation are now well established as providing a possible vehicle for concurrent computation. Although data-driven computation frees the architecture from the constraints of the single program counter, processor and global memory, inherent in the classic von Neumann computer, there can still be problems with the unconstrained generation of fresh result tokens if a pure data flow approach is adopted. The advantages of allowing serial processing for those parts of a program which are inherently serial, and of permitting a demand-driven, as well as data-driven, mode of operation are identified and described.
The MUSE machine described here is a structured architecture supporting both serial and parallel processing which allows the abstract structure of a program to be mapped onto the machine in a logical way.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Backus, J., “Can programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann style? A Functional Style and Its Algebra of Programs,”Communications of the ACM, 21, 8, pp. 613–640, August, 1978.
Backus, J. W., Beeber, R. J., Best, S., Goldberg, R., Haibt L. M., Herrick, H. L., Nelson, R. A., Sayre, D., Sheridan, P. B., Stern, H., Ziller, I., Hughes, R. A., and Nutt, R., “The FORTRAN automatic coding system,” inProc. Western Joint Computer Conf., Los Angeles, 1957.
McGraw, J., Skedzielewski, S., Allan, S., Grit, D., Oldehoeft, R., Glauert, J., Dobes, I., and Hohensee, P., “SISAL: Streams and Iterations in a single-assignment language,”Language reference manual version 1.1, Report M-146, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
INMOS,occam ™ Programming Manual, Prentice-Hall, 1984.
Watson, I. and Gurd, J. R., “A practical Dataflow Computer,”IEEE Computer, 15, 2, pp. 51–57, February, 1982.
Browning, S. A., “The Tree Machine,”Ph. D. Thesis, Computer Science Dept. California Institute of Technology, 1980.
Darlington, J. and Reeve, M. J., “Alice: A Multiprocessor Reduction Machine for Applicative Languages,”Proc. ACM/MIT Conference on Functional Languages and Computer Architecture, 1981.
Treleaven, P. C., Brownbridge, D. R., and Hopkins, R. P., “Data-Driven and Demand-Driven Computer Architecture,”Computing Surveys, 14, 1, pp. 93–143, March, 1982.
“Data Flow Systems,”Computer,15,2, February, 1982.
Karp, R. M. and Miller, R. E., “Properties of a model for parallel computations: Determinacy, Termination, Queueing”SIAM J. Applied Mathematics, 14, 6, pp. 1390–1411, November, 1966.
Dennis, J. B., Boughton, G. A., and Leung, C. K. C., “Building Blocks for Data Flow Prototypes,”Proceedings of 1980 Symposium on Computer Architecture, pp. 1–8, 1980.
Arvind, Kathail, V., and Pingali, K., “A Dataflow Architecture with Tagged tokens,”Internal report, MIT/LCS/TM-174, Laboratory for Computer Science, MIT, September, 1980.
Suzuki, T., Tanaka, H., and Moto-oka, S., “Control Systems for ‘Topstar’ data flow machines and an evaluation thereof,”Proceedings Annual Conference Japan Information Processing Society, pp. 85–86, May, 1980.
Dennis, J. B., “Data Flow Supercomputers,”Computer, pp. 48–56, November, 1980.
Weng, K. S., “Stream-Oriented Computation in Recursive Data-Flow Schemas,” M. S. Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, October, 1975.
“The Texas Instruments TMS 9900, TMS 9980, and TMS 9940 Products,” inOsborne 16-bit Microprocessor Handbook (A. Osborne, and G. Kane, eds.), pp. 3.1–3.D17, OSBORNE/McGraw-Hill, Berkeley, California.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
About this article
Cite this article
Brailsford, D.F., Duckworth, R.J. The MUSE machine—An architecture for structured data flow computation. NGCO 3, 181–195 (1985). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03037068
Received:
Revised:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03037068