A unified resource management and execution control mechanism for data flow machines

This paper presents a unified resource management and execution control mechanism for data flow machines. The mechanism integrates load control, depth-first execution control, cache memory control and a load balancing mechanism. All of these mechanisms are controlled by such basic information as the number of active state processes, Na. In data flow machines, synchronization among processes is an essential hardware function. Hence, Na can easily be detected by the hardware. Load control and depth-first execution control make it possible to execute a program with a designated degree of parallelism, and depth-first order. A cache memory of data flow processors in multiprocessing environments can be realized by using load and depth-first execution controls together with a deterministic replacement algorithm, i.e. replacement of only waiting state processes. A new load balancing method called group load balancing is also presented to evaluate the above mentioned mechanisms in multiprocessor environments. These unified control mechanisms are evaluated on a register transfer level simulator for a list-processing oriented data flow machine.