A view of dataflow*

Abstract

In 1946 John von Neumann outlined an organization for computers 1 that has dominated the languages and architecture of machines to this day—the familiar sequential, one-word-at-a-time instruction stream which modifies the contents of a memory. Although the von Neumann model has proved to be a viable and powerful approach to computation, we have chosen to explore other models of computation to determine if they offer advantages in ease of programming, exploitation of concurrency and performance. A primary motivation is new technology such as large scale integration (LSI) which has greatly expanded the range of choice in computer design.