[mwcampbell]

In your research, are you using a new programming language to take advantage of dataflow scheduling techniques, or are you working with one or more existing languages? If the latter, do you have any data or opinions on which languages or language features are most amenable to an effective dataflow-based architecture?

[knz42]

We use just C extensions for now, very close to what Cilk does.

1) What is really important is to realize that dataflow variables (I-structures) are not in memory. So any language/library that gives dataflow semantics to programmers should not allow programmers to indirect through memory to get to the I-structures. This is the main requirement for an efficient projection to a hardware dataflow scheduler.

In practice, things like Occam, SISAL and most pure functional programming languages are OK-ish.

2) any language should allow an (advanced) programmer (or compiler) to annotate the instructions to also suggest some ordering not related to data dependencies. As I explained before dataflow scheduling tends to destroy order and break locality, and for some applications this is very bad. Unfortunately all existing dataflow-ish languages (incl most functional languages) were designed with the outdated vision that all memory accesses have the same cost. We now know this is not true any more.

Other than using threads (as I explained before) a well-known theoretical way forward is to introduce optional control flow edges between instructions using "ghost" data dependencies, which impact scheduling but do not allocate registers/I-vars. However I am not aware of languages where this is possible.

[gruseom]

Could you expand on the following?

What is really important is to realize that dataflow variables (I-structures) are not in memory. So any language/library that gives dataflow semantics to programmers should not allow programmers to indirect through memory to get to the I-structures. This is the main requirement for an efficient projection to a hardware dataflow scheduler

I don't know what you mean by I-structures, or dataflow variables, or why they are not in memory, or why allowing programmers to get at them would mess with a hardware dataflow schedule. I can guess at what you mean by all of these, but a more detailed explanation would still be very interesting.

[yvdriess]

See: [5] Arvind, R. S. Nikhil, and K. K. Pingali, “I-structures: data structures for parallel computing,” Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS, vol. 11, no. 4, Oct. 1989.

[gruseom]

Thank you.