CSC/ECE 506 Fall 2007/wiki1 10 mt

Dataflow & Systolic Architectures

Dataflow and systolic are two of the many possible parallel computer architectures. Unlike shared address, message passing and data parallel processing, the dataflow and systolic architectures were not as commonly used for parallel programming systems although they recieved a considerable amount of analysis from both private industry and academia.

Dataflow architecture is in oppostion to the von Neumann or control flow architecture which has memory, and I/O subsystem, an arithmetic unit and a control unit. The one shared memory is used for both program instructions and data with a data bus and address bus between the memory and processing unit. Because instructions and data must be fetched in sequential order, a bottleneck may occur limiting the throughput between the CPU and the memory.