An Intermediate Form for Data Flow Programs

Abstract

A data flow program, often represented as a data flow graph, is a program that expresses a computation by indicating the data dependencies among operators. A data flow computer is a machine designed to take advantage of concurrency in data flow graphs by executing data-independent operations in parallel (that is, a sequential ordering existing only between operations for which the result of one operation is an operand of the other). This thesis presents a form of computer representation of data flow programs (based on data flow graphs) that can serve as an intermediate form in the translation of source language code into machine code for a data flow computer. The proposed intermediate representation is implemented in the structured programming language CLU, and is designed to allow analysis and transformation of programs (for optimization purposes) to be performd either automatically or with programmer interaction.