Experiments with Dataaow on a General-purpose Parallel Computer

The MIT J-Machine 2], a massively-parallel computer, is an experiment in providing general-purpose mechanisms for communication, synchronization, and naming that will support a wide variety of parallel models of comptuation. We have developed two experimental dataaow programming systems for the J-Machine. For the rst system, we adapted Papadopoulos' explicit token store 12] to implement static and then dynamic dataaow. Our second system made use of Iannucci's hybrid execution model 10] to combine several dataaow graph nodes into a single sequence, decreasing scheduling overhead. By combining the strengths of the two systems, it is possible to produce a system with competitive performance. We have demonstrated the feasibility of eeciently executing dataaow programs on a general-purpose parallel computer.