1993 Reports

DFLOPS: A Data Flow Machine for Production Systems

Cheng, Fu-Chiung; Wu, Mei-Yi

Many production system machines have been proposed to speed up the execution of production system programs. Most of them are implemented based on conventional control flow model of execution which is limited by the "von Neumann bottleneck." In this paper we propose DFLOPS, a new multiprocessor data flow machine, for parallel processing of production systems. Rule programs are compiled into data flow graphs and then mapped into DFLOPS processing elements. Three levels of parallelism: Rule Level Parallelism, RHS Level Parallelism and LHS Parallelism are fully exploited to achieve high performance. The design and implementation of DFLOPS is presented in detail. The distinguishing characteristics of this proposed machine lies in its simplicity, fully-pipelined processing and fine grain parallelism. The initial results reveal that the performance of production systems is greatly improved.