[derefr]

I've always felt like the best interactive educational model for forming a good intuition on how to maximize throughput and minimize worst-case latency in a pipelined parallel dataflow system (e.g. DSPs, FPGAs, GPUs, or even distributed message-passing systems) would be some variant of the game Factorio. Specifically, one with:

1. instead of buildings, IP cores doing processing steps;

2. instead of belts, wires — which take up far less than one tile, so many can run together along one tile and many can connect to a single IP core; where each wire can move its contents at arbitrary speed (including "stopped") — but where this will have a power-use cost proportional to the wire's speed;

3. an overall goal of optimizing for rocket launches per second per power-usage watt. (Which should overall require minimizing the amount of stuff moving around across the whole base, avoiding pipeline stalls; doing as much parallel batching as possible; etc.)

(Yes, I know Shenzhen I/O exists. It's great for what it does — modelling signals and signal transformations — but it doesn't model individual packets of data as moving along wires with propagation delay, and with the potential for e.g. parallel-line interference given a bad encoding scheme, quantum tunnelling, overclocking or undervolting components, etc. I think a Factorio-variant would actually be much more flexible to implement these aspects.)