Perspectives of data-flow architectures

For about forty years now, computer architecture design has followed the Von Neumann principles. By added features, e.g. pipelined processor organisation, vector/array-processing, multiprocessing and today’s technology we are looking at supercomputer designs, which may have scalar performance of several hundred Mflops and vector performance of thousands of Mflops but the design space of Von Neumann-type computers seems to be exploited and hardware technology is assumed to reach a point at which physical constraints limit further performance improvements. Therefore, it is growingly accepted that non-Von Neumann models of computation are necessary to exploit program concurrency. A highly promising part of current research on concurrent computer organisation is focused on two principles, which are distinguished by the way computations manipulate their arguments and by the way the execution of computations is initiated: Pure data-driven schemes and schemes which combine data-driven and demand-driven computation. Both schemes seen suited to support a project ‘Guiding Land Vehicles along Roadways by Computer Vision’.