Methods for handling structures in data-flow systems

Abstract

Data-flow languages are an elegant solution to the programmability of general-purpose multiprocessors. However, data-flow semantics introduce large overhead at execution time. Indeed, the effective representation, storage, and processing of data is diltScult due to the functionality of the dataflow model of computation. In this paper, various aspects of ~,his issue are explained in detail and several solutions that have been put forward in the current literature are surveyed. We present also alternatives: in the first one, we raise the level of computation to that of arrays for more efficient operation. In the two others, the opposite approach is taken, and the notion of array is entirely done away with at the execution level in order to take advantage of the data-flow semantics at their best logical level of performance.