DFScala: High Level Dataflow Support for Scala

Abstract

In this paper we present DFScala, a library for constructing and executing dataflow graphs in the Scala language. Through the use of Scala this library allows the programmer to construct coarse grained dataflow graphs that take advantage of functional semantics for the dataflow graph and both functional and imperative semantics within the dataflow nodes. This combination allows for very clean code which exhibits the properties of dataflow programs, but we believe is more accessible to imperative programmers. We first describe DFScala in detail, before using a number of benchmarks to evaluate both its scalability and its absolute performance relative to existing codes. DFScala has been constructed as part of the Teraflux project and is being used extensively as a basis for further research into dataflow programming.