Dataflow Computers: Their History and Future

Abstract The dataflow model of computation offers an attractive alternative to control‐flow in extracting parallelism from programs. The execution of a dataflow instruction is based on the availability of its operand(s); hence, the synchronization of parallel activities is implicit in the dataflow model. Instructions in dataflow model do not impose any constraints on sequencing except for the data dependencies in the program. The elegant representation of concurrency in dataflow computation led to considerable interest in dataflow modes over the past three decades. These efforts have led to successively more elaborate architechtural implementations of the model. However, studies form past projects have revealed a number of inefficiencies in dataflow computing. Recent advances that may address these deficiencies have generated a renewed interest in dataflow. In this article we will survey the various issues and developments in dataflow computing.