A comparison of structure accessing techniques in IdA and SISAL on the CSIRAC II dataflow multiprocessor

Describes the implementation of the functional language IdA on the CSIRAC II dataflow multiprocessor. IdA is a derivative of MIT´s ID Nouveau language and CSIRAC II is a dataflow architecture which combines the features of static queued and dynamic dataflow architectures and as such is outside the generally accepted taxonomy. The non-strict implementation of structures in IdA exploits the overlap in the production and consumption of structures. This eliminates the unnecessary serialisation of the computation evidenced in the implementation of another functional language SISAL. To illustrate this, results for the numerical weather prediction code, Shallow, are presented for both IdA and SISAL formulations. These results show that for similar instruction counts a 39% reduction in runtime is obtained for the IdA implementation over the SISAL implementation in a representative scientific application