Abstract: Streaming models of computation are regaining attention among researchers seeking effective ways to express and exploit concurrency. In this talk I will review a long history of dataflow variants, specifically analyzing the tradeoff between expressiveness and analyzability. In particular, I will argue that using conditional routing and nondeterminate merge of data tokens as a substitute for control flow is inelegant (analogous to unstructured goto) and leads to formalisms that are unanalyzable. Languages such as LabVIEW and StreamIT offer more elegant structured dataflow mechanisms. These structured mechanisms can be extended to improve expressiveness by combining dataflow with state machines and with imperative programs, and by supporting recursion. As expressiveness improves, however, analyzability degrades, and effectively exploiting concurrency for parallel execution becomes more challenging.

Bio: Edward A. Lee is the Robert S. Pepper Distinguished Professor and former chair of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) department at U.C. Berkeley. His research interests center on design, modeling, and simulation of embedded, real-time computational systems. He is a director of Chess, the Berkeley Center for Hybrid and Embedded Software Systems, and is the director of the Berkeley Ptolemy project. He is co-author of five books and numerous papers. He has led the development of several influential open-source software packages, including Ptolemy, Ptolemy II, HyVisual, and VisualSense. His bachelors degree (B.S.) is from Yale University (1979), his masters (S.M.) from MIT (1981), and his Ph.D. from U. C. Berkeley (1986). From 1979 to 1982 he was a member of technical staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, in the Advanced Data Communications Laboratory. He is a co-founder of BDTI, Inc., where he is currently a Senior Technical Advisor, and has consulted for a number of other companies. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, was an NSF Presidential Young Investigator, and won the 1997 Frederick Emmons Terman Award for Engineering Education.

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