DDDP-a Distributed Data Driven Processor

This paper describes an architecture of a data flow computer named the Distributed Data Driven Processor (DDDP), and presents an experimental system and the results of experiments using several benchmarks. The experimental system has four processing elements connected by a ring bus, and a structured data memory. The main features of our system are that each processing element is provided with a hardware hashing mechanism to implement token coloring, and a ring bus is used to pass tokens concurrently among processing elements. A hardware monitor was used to measure the performance of the experimental system. The experimental system adopts a low key technology and yet is capable of executing about 0.7 million instructions per second through the benchmarks. This implies that data flow computers can be alternative to the conventional von-Neumann computers if state-of-the-art technologies are adequately introduced.