Heuristic search strategies on a dataflow computer

Abstract

In recent years, sweeping changes in computer architecture have been transpiring as the technology continues to advance. As the physical limits for computational speed are approached, different design alternatives to the standard von Neumann architecture must be explored. The static dataflow architecture is one of the new possibilities being examined and involves a completely different concept in computation. By programming an irregular computational problem such as a heuristic search strategy on a static dataflow computer, its usefulness for solving difficult problems can be demonstrated. A static dataflow computer has been defined by a hardware description language to simulate the heuristic search strategies. All the dataflow program graphs are given to show the natural parallelism being extracted from the irregular computational processes. The outcome exposes an essential need for the implementation of dataflow computer systems.