A machine model for dataflow actors and its applications

In application areas that process stream-like data such as multimedia, networking and DSP, the pipelined concurrent processing is frequently represented as a dataflow network of communicating computational kernels connected by FIFO queues. However, while dataflow is a natural medium for conceptualizing and modeling stream-processing systems, its adoption as a programming methodology has been hindered by an unappealing choice between expressiveness and efficient implementability—efficient implementation techniques being primarily limited to restricted subclasses of dataflow programs. The paper presents a simple machine model for a very general class of dataflow programs and shows how it can be used as a foundation for their efficient implementation.